Acronis

Acronis, Offering innovative back up and disaster recovery solutions across the globe.

Acronis are a truly global corporation.  Their corporate headquarters are in Switzerland but they have offices all over Europe and America, as well as bases in Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Australia.

Acronis has more than 5 million customers in 145 countries.

Acronis have a very different approach to most of the providers we encounter as their background is back up and software. The products they offer reflect this.

The main focus is back up and disaster recovery as opposed to syncing.  Although they offer a range of personal plans, it feels like the website is more geared towards the corporate market and personal users looking for a business like experience.

Acronis offer some interesting bells and whistles. Such as their free hard disk monitor which will warn you when your drive is about to fail.

Acronis also offer a Disk monitor for £34.95 (although you are offered a free trial) which is a set of tools that will help you protect your data and optimise your disk usage. There are a number of other upgrades and software solutions to help keep you running smoothly or aid recovery after a disaster.

Backup and restore features:

Acronis offer 5 plans, 2 for personal and 3 for business.

Only 1 of the personal plans will back up to cloud and this is True Image Cloud, the other is true image 2016 and is software for local (your own device) backup only.

We will, of course be focusing on the cloud product.

On the business side only 1 plan offers cloud storage as part of the package (alongside local storage) which is Acronis Backup Service.

This is a more basic plan designed for a small business with limited resources and limited ability to store their own backups.

The other 2 products are local backup software that enables you to back up to cloud with an annual subscription on top of the license fee.

You have Acronis Backup which is for small businesses with the resources to store backups but limited expertise.

Acronis Backup Advanced is for bigger companies who can store their own backups and need more advanced capabilities.

All Acronis products offer continuous and incremental back up, as well as file syncing.  You can also schedule your backups.  This is all pretty standard.  What isn’t, is the fact that Acronis backs up your operating system as well as your files and folders, so in the event of a disaster you can be back up and running much faster.

On business plans they also offer full disaster recovery services on a pay as you go basis. You don’t see this offered very often either which is a shame as it is a brilliant feature.

You can back up NAS or external drive at a file level but not at disk level, meaning you will have to select the individual files rather than simply the drive. This may not be ideal but the data still gets stored.

Acronis also offers bandwidth throttling and file sharing options which, puts them up there with the competition. You can also safely and securely share folders without file size limits.

In fact there are no file size limits unless you are trying to upload through a browser in which case 2 GB is the maximum file size.  Not the best in the market but it certainly makes them strong.

Security

Your data is protected with a 256-bit encryption key before it is uploaded via a 2048-bit SSL tunnel.

You will own the key so even Acronis cannot access your data. This is fantastic from a security perspective but the onus is on you to keep your key safe.

Acronis own data centres all over the world which are all equipped with UPS and diesel generators to ensure power availability for up to 48 hours in the event of an outage.

They also have early smoke detector, temperature and humidity monitoring as well as excellent physical security to prevent intruders.

Your data is split between multiple servers, all with additional Reed-Solomon data chunk distribution which offers excellent redundancy and error correction.

There is no geo-redundant storage but their strategy does appear to be very robust.

Supported Configurations and Mobile Access:

Acronis aren’t the strongest in this area. They do not support Windows phones or some of the older Mac operating systems.

They start at OS X 10.9 Mavericks so it is no good for any of the big cat users.  Most of the competition support 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or higher.

Acronis also support Windows XP SP3, 7, 8, home server and Windows 10.

They are better with Apple mobile devices. Supporting anything from iPad 2 and iPhone 3GS up.  Android devices with 2.2 or later are also supported.

Price Plans

You can have a 30 day free trial on all plans which will give you ample time to see if this is the solution for you.

Personal/Acronis True Image Cloud :

Acronis offers very good pricing for what you get as all cloud packages offer unlimited storage.

 

1 computer + 3 mobile devices – £64.95 a year

3 computers + 10 mobile devices – £109.95 a year

5 computers + 15 mobile devices – £134.95 a year

Business:

Pricing here is a little more complex and a lot more expensive. There are 3 packages, one of which automatically includes cloud and then you select the number of devices and level of storage that you require.

Acronis Backup Service

– Your most basic package is the workstation pack which will give you 3 desktop machines and 0.25 TB of storage for £189.00 a year. An additional 0.25TB will cost an extra £469 a year and an extra 5TB will cost a whopping £5309.00 a year.  I suspect a small business with a lot of data to store will struggle with this.

You also have the server pack which will give you 1 server, 5 virtual machines and 0.5TB of cloud storage for £559 a year.  Additional storage will cost the same as for the workstation pack.

Acronis Backup

The backup only packages start at £59.00 a year for a PC and go up to £599.00 a year for a server. To add cloud, for each pc you can add 1TB for £109.00 a year or 2TB for £449.00 a year.

For each server you can have from 0.5TB for £299.00 a year to 2TB for £1049.00 a year.  Again this is rather pricey, possibly prohibitively so for some small businesses.

Acronis Backup advanced

The backup only packages start at £79 a year for a PC and go up to £1399.00 for a universal license. The cloud subscription will cost the same as for Acronis Backup.

Support

Acronis offer excellent support.  There is a comprehensive knowledge base with video tutorials.

You also have the choice of Live Chat, Telephone or email support.

They say you should wait no longer than 2 minutes to get through for live chat and telephone.  Emails should receive a response in less than 3 days.

 

Conclusion

Acronis are definitely more geared towards backup and disaster recovery and they offer excellent service and tools around this.

Their cloud offering on the personal side is very competitive too.

When it comes to business this is an expensive but comprehensive solution with well thought out solutions for keeping you up and running with all your data.