Software Review of Acronis "True Image 8.0" and White Canyon Software "WipeDrive"

Backups and Wiping Old Drives

      by Fran Crane

      Due to an “act of nature,” I found it necessary to replace both of my hard drives. They gave up together and what a bummer.
      In June 2005, the General Meeting of the Computer Club of Oklahoma City featured Gene and Linda Barlow. They showed us several programs to make our computer more secure and efficient. They also showed a couple of programs to backup and restore and wipe a hard drive in case of real problems. I purchased Acronis True Image 8.0 and another program called Wipe Drive by White Canyon from them at the meeting. I must have been clairvoyant because two months later I found that both of my hard drives were failing. They were still under warranty so were replaced with like drives. Of course, the replacements came unformatted.
True Image 8.0 allows you to archive each drive, or partition as a compressed file. Each additional backup is appended to the original archive with a separate name. These accumulate with each additional backup. Making the original archive takes longer, of course, but surprisingly less time than I had expected. Each succeeding archive takes only a short time. Since I knew my hard drives were on “borrowed time”, I was careful to backup each day.
      It helps to read the Help files; however, I am a great one to wing it instead of reading the directions. Had I read them, it would have saved me some time and hassle. I installed the one drive and proceeded to install Windows XP Pro. After I had it all installed, I ran True Image and restored the backup for my C: drive. (I could have saved myself a lot of time, if I had read the directions. I could have placed the True Image CD in the drive, instead of the Windows XP CD, when I first booted the machine and it would have allowed me to partition, format and restore my backup without first installing windows.) This program is really slick! After restoring my C: drive and Windows, I rebooted my machine. Windows came up with even the wallpaper I had before and everything was restored to exactly what it was on the old drive. I did this with each partition and was up and running in no time at all.
      After installing the second drive with the True Image disk already in the CD drive, it took me through the steps of partitioning the drive and getting it ready to restore the other two archives I had made. This is my backup software from now on, I am sold.
     You can purchase this, if you haven’t already, directly from Gene Barlow at www.ugr.com.  His user group price (on CD): $34 + S&H or just $34 as a download. This sells for $49.99 from Acronis.

     The other purchase I made from the Barlows is one called WipeDrive from White Canyon software. I wasn’t sure at the time I would even use it, but thought it would be good to have in case I needed it. Well, again, I was right. Since these two hard drives were under warranty, they were replaced; however, I had to send the old drives back. I wanted to wipe these drives clean before I returned them. So I booted my computer with the WipeDrive CD in the CD drive. It took me to a DOS- like interface and walked me through my choices of drives to the one I wanted. Then, it also gave me the choice of how many “wipes” I wanted to have. I chose seven wipes so it would be difficult to find any of my data on the drive. I had the choice of 1,3,7, or 12 wipes for the drive. Seven wipes takes awhile depending on the size of your drive so don’t get in any hurry. Wipe Drive from White Canyon is $39.99, from the Barlows with the User Group discount it is $27.00.


Fran Crane is the Study Group Leader of the Windows Odds and Ends SG and the Editor of the eMonitor.