Acronis specialises in hard drive housekeeping software and True Image is the company's offering for saving and restoring complete hard drive images. It runs from Windows, but also includes a facility to prepare a boot floppy or CD, so you can get at the images even when Windows won't load.

All the main tasks the program can undertake are Wizard-driven, taking you step-by-step through the process in a clear and logical way. Backups can be created on a variety of different media, including recordable CDs and DVDs, external drives connected through USB 2 or FireWire ports, and network drives.

You can restore complete images or selected files, making the program particularly versatile should you corrupt or inadvertently delete important information. Support on the desktop and in the PDF manual for cloning an image from one drive to another is particularly clear and, although Acronis also sells a dedicated utility for hard drive upgrading, True Image 7 handles this task well, too.

Backups can be scheduled automatically and options such as incremental backup are well explained. Incremental backup means True Image only saves sectors of the hard drive which have changed since the last backup. The key advantage is that the size of the backup is considerably smaller than with a complete drive image. It does mean, though, that you need to maintain at least one full image and a complete list of incremental supplements, to be able to restore a current image.

If you're worried about inadvertently deleting a backup image, you can create what Acronis calls a Secure Zone, which holds just images and can't be accessed directly from Windows - only through True Image. All these extra features, and the attractive price, make this modern piece of hard drive imaging software an attractive proposition.