Op-Ed: Upgrading to Windows 7 with peace of mind

The following is part of DigitalJournal.com's series covering Microsoft's Windows 7 launch. Acronis True Image is designed to offer users backup and a bootable rescue disk, but its main purpose is to give you peace of mind while upgrading your operating system. The best thing to hope for is that you’ll never need it at all. Windows 7 allows a smooth transition when installing it over a previous Windows installation, smoother than earlier Windows versions claimed. I used a product made for this purpose called Acronis True Image Home ($49.99 U.S.) to make a backup of the entire disk so I could reconstitute my Vista system should I repeat a previous experience, in which installing a new version of Windows over an older one nearly destroyed all my data as well as countless hours of time to fix it. Acronis True Image also includes a bootable rescue disk maker and a system backup utility, which makes it an everyday application. But its main use is to keep you from freaking out when you think you might have done something wrong while installing a new version of Windows. This is especially true of Windows XP users. Installing Windows 7 over Windows XP erases the disk, and you will lose your data, and hence having a whole system backup is essential, sol you can transport data back to the new environment. You still will need to reinstall your applications but you can mount the image made by Acronis of your XP installation, and drag and drop your data to the new system. Acronis has played craftily here, giving you a backup of a backup, so to speak: It lets you convert its native backup file format to a virtual hard disk; you can then boot from it with Windows 7 Ultimate or run it as a virtual machine. That way, you keep your XP system while using Windows 7. But I got it specifically to backstop my installation of Windows 7 on top of Vista, which was supposed to be a much more natural and easier process than with previous Windows versions. It created a file on a spare hard drive that was an exact image of my production machine. But installing Windows 7 this was so easy that it left me wondering why I had bothered with Acronis at all — until I remembered that if I hadn’t, my heart would have been in my mouth during the whole installation process. By its sheer presence and promise of a soft landing, it kept me from panicking. What more can you ask of backup software?