Acronis One-Click Backup

The Acronis One-Click Backup tool allows you to begin protecting your critical data as soon as you install Acronis True Image Home 2011. Once One-Click Backup is set up (this takes just a few moments), one click provides full-time protection.

When you choose to protect your critical data, the program will offer to back up the system partition and your personal data to a destination it considers the optimum place for backups (see the destination selection algorithm below). You can choose another destination for backups by clicking the down arrow to the right of the destination and browsing for a destination you prefer.

By default, Acronis True Image Home 2011 will schedule subsequent full backups of the system partition once a month. After completing a new full backup, the program will delete the old one to save disk space.

In case of Windows 7 the program will also back up the System Reserved partition. You may need to recover that partition if your system crashes.

The program also lets you enable continuous protection of your personal data. For information on the default content of that data see What personal data is protected by One-click Backup.

After the selected items are backed up, you can change the default settings for My computer backup and personal data backup. To do this, select the appropriate backup on the main screen and then click Edit backup settings in the Operations menu.

If you choose a removable media as the backup destination (for instance, an USB hard drive), it will be made bootable by default. In other words, a bootable recovery environment, a standalone Acronis True Image Home 2011 version and the backed up data, will be written to the removable media.

You will be able to run Acronis True Image Home 2011 from the removable media on a bare-metal system or a crashed computer that cannot boot. Just make the removable media device the first boot device in BIOS, boot to Acronis True Image Home 2011 and recover your system and/or personal data.

To start One-Click Backup, click the Back up now button. Clicking Cancel will cancel One-Click Backup. If you decide to use this feature later, click Tools & Utilities in the main program menu and then choose Acronis One-Click Backup.

Destination selection algorithm

For those interested in how One-Click Backup tool selects a destination for backup, here is the algorithm the program uses:

  1. First of all, the program estimates the space required for operation of the One-Click Backup tool.
  2. If there is an external hard drive with enough free space, the backups will be stored on that drive because such backup location will provide better protection for your computer.
  3. If the first option is unavailable but you have at least two internal hard drives, the program will back up to a non-system hard drive using a partition with the maximum free space.
  4. If your computer has only one hard drive with several partitions (not counting hidden ones), then the program will use the non-system partition with maximum free space.

Acronis One-Click Backup