I'm not going to begin this review by telling you how important it is to carry out regular backups of your data. If you're reading this you already know that, probably through personal experience of data loss. We've reviewed several incarnations of Acronis' True Image Home product, most recently last year's 2009 version. The 2010 variant adds a few new features to the mix, but in many ways it's similar to last year's model.

Start up the software and you're presented with a helpful screen that asks you what you'd like to do, offering simple options such as backing up disks or files & folders, recovering the same or selecting from a recently made backup archive.

Choose to backup, as you logically would to start with, and you have various further options, some of which are new to this year's product. You can, of course, backup an entire archive (or several) to an image file, which is the tried and trusted method of making swift, easy-to-restore backups of your C: drive and others. You can also select specific types of file and folder to backup, if you'd prefer to do things at that level, and True Image 2010 is happy to hold your hand in guiding you through exactly what to archive in each case.

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Alternatively, and new to this version, you can do an online backup, though you'll have to subscribe to the Acronis service in order to do so (starting at £3.95 per month for 25GB of storage: see website for details). This could be convenient if you're the sort of person who really doesn't consider on-site backups to be safe.

Also new in this year's incarnation of True Image is Non-Stop Backup. This is pretty self-explanatory: switch it on and a snapshot of any changes is made every five minutes or so. If you do something you regret, like accidentally wiping your entire wedding photograph collection, you can simply roll back to an earlier time and retrieve the data you lost. Inevitably there is an overhead in activating this setting, in terms of both disk space and CPU utilisation. But if you're the kind of person who regularly deletes or overwrites things they shouldn't, it could save you a lot of hassle.

Whatever method you choose when backing up your data, you have a vast range of options from which to choose. For example, when running an image-type backup we were able to choose compression level, password, performance priority, notifications on completion, scripts to run before and/or after the backup operation, post-process validation, error handling, archive splitting and more.

Backup speeds seem good, too. On our unremarkable test laptop we achieved rates of around 1GB per minute with average compression, which compares well with other drive imaging tools.

Validation of backed-up archives has been simplified and improved so that it should be more efficient for incremental backups, while True Image 2010 can access - and convert between - VHD archive file formats and its own TIB format. It can even boot from them, and you could potentially use these images on virtual machines.

Recovery and restore features are pretty impressive and it's easy to drill into backup files and restore them in their entirety or on a file-by-file basis. It's hard to think of a situation in which you'd be unable to recover from a major failure, assuming you had run a recent backup and created the necessary recovery disks or set up the Startup Recovery Manager as the program prompts you to do.

Other features? The 'Try & Decide' tool - that allows you to run all sorts of potentially malicious and dubious software, before rolling back your system as if it had never touched your PC - is here again, as are the utilities that variously let you clone a disk, add a new drive, securely delete files and folders and wipe entire drives. Also present is the one-click backup option that makes a good guess at what you want to archive and where you want to store it, though most intermediate and advanced users will probably overrule it.

A nice evolution of last year's version of this powerful and flexible backup and recovery tool. The new features are likely to be of use to many people, and even if they're not, the core backup and recovery capabilities are likely to be well worth the asking price.