True Image 11 is the latest in a long line of backup and recovery suites from Acronis, with this version offering a range of powerful new features and support.

The most notable new addition here is the Try & Decide feature, which uses a Secure Zone (a protected partition inaccessible by conventional software) to test any alterations to your system before they’re applied to your main partition.

This works extremely well, and is a great way to reduce system crashes and helps prevent clutter slowing down your computer. The backup set has also been refined, allowing you to protect your system state including Registry and boot files. You can save the current state of specific applications for later restore and backup your emails.

In addition to these tools, a range of disk utilities will help you securely delete data, files, folders and system activity from your hard drive. You can clone disks by copying partitions to another drive, perform boot-time restore and even continue using your computer while a restore is under way. With effective smart scheduling, along with set-and-forget backups, this latest version is the least intrusive yet, and by taking a wizard-based approach it’s also easy to use.

One thing to bear in mind is that many of the features require you to have a substantial amount of free hard drive space to take full advantage of the high level of protection, though with hard drives so cheap these days having to pay for a little extra storage isn’t something that should put you off.

Being reasonably priced, there’s really no excuse for not utilising software such as this to protect your home computer. And if you own a previous version of True Image, the powerful new tools in this release mean it’s well worth upgrading.