Acronis 11- is it dangerous?

I just bought Acronis "True Image 11 Home" and read the 120 page pdf manual.
I'm blown away with how powerful the program is. I haven't yet installed the
program but will soon. Since the program is so powerful, I'm afraid I'll hit
the wrong button somewhere and cause some damage to the system. Or, since
the program can make major changes to the file system- if it's buggy, it
could blow up the system.

Am I being paranoid or is there any real danger? I'm using Vista on a new
high end Dell which as of now seems very stable. I installed a 500 gig hard
drive for video editing and as a place for backups, but now that I've read
the manual, I think I'll also get an external USB drive for backups.

Joe

Joe <abc.RemoveThis@xyz.com> wrote:

> I just bought Acronis "True Image 11 Home" and read the 120 page pdf manual. I'm blown away with how powerful the
> program is. I haven't yet installed the program but will soon. Since the program is so powerful, I'm afraid I'll hit
> the wrong button somewhere and cause some damage to the system.

Cant see any area where you can do that except that like with
any imager, you can obviously restore an old image that wont
work to your system without an image of the current system,
so you cant go back to the known working system etc.

> Or, since the program can make major changes to the file system- if it's buggy, it could blow up the system.

Yes, thats theoretically possible with any imager
or backup program if the restore doesnt work.

But with TI, there's a decent support forum so you would be able
to see that plenty have problems with it before you use it yourself.

> Am I being paranoid

Yes.

> or is there any real danger?

Just the obvious one I mentioned at the top that any imager has.

> I'm using Vista on a new high end Dell which as of now seems very stable. I installed a 500 gig hard drive for video
> editing and as a place for backups, but now that I've read the manual, I think I'll also get an external USB drive for
> backups.

Yeah, its very handy. And having plenty of storage to write images to
minimises the risk that you wont have a current image of the working
system to return to if you do stuff things up with a restore restoring
what you thought was a working system but which is a dud one etc.