Acronis Cyber Protect Reviews

We are a solution provider and Acronis Backup is one of the products that we implement for our customers.

The main reasons that our customers like Acronis are that it is very strong and easy to use. Many of our customers use Acronis without any problems.

They have anti-ransomware active protection in the product.

The problems that we face are often related to the customer's network, although sometimes there are problems with the software, such as an error in the configuration. There is no perfect product.

We have been working with Acronis Backup for between five and six years.

This is a strong product, and any problems that our customers have had are very small.

We have approximately 50 customers who use this product.

Acronis support is very strong and they're available 24/7, online via chat or email, or by telephone. There are times that we have faced issues, and when we opened tickets, they found solutions very fast.

Often, the team will read the logs that we supply, and then, in quick time, they find solutions. These are either fixed using patches or they make suggestions for changes to the settings. One of the reasons that our customers purchase Acronis is because they don't have major problems or bugs in their software.

We have many customers that have converted from other backup products to Acronis. Two examples of these are Veritas and Veeam. 

The initial setup is simple. It is not complex at all.

This is an affordable product and fits within our customers' budgets.

We are currently testing the new version, 15. Based on our experience, we have been providing input to their pre-sales team, and the feedback was taken back to the management. Now, everything seems to be running fine.

For example, in the new version, they have more protection options for malware, and they have additional tools to assist the IT administrator in controlling the network. These including things like management tools for remote desktops and vulnerability management. 

Any customer who uses Acronis that has needed to restore anything from their backup has had a 99% success rate, where they have been able to restore data without any problems.

Nothing is perfect and gets a full mark. We have faced some issues, although the support is strong and they take issues seriously. They don't let our customers get upset at the product, and they have solved all of the problems that we have faced.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Before I had this product, I was doing backups one disk at a time using the tool that comes with Microsoft. I do database work and my projects are large enough that I need multiple disk drives and it was just getting to be too much record-keeping. In some cases, I didn't do my backups manually when I should've, and I lost things because of it. Acronis allowed me to organize all that and automate it and so now, my backups happen automatically; I don't even have to think about them.

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I use two products. I use the backup solution and I use something called Disk Director, which is a related product. Together, they allow me to manage all of my storage space. I'm a software developer and I'm often reconfiguring things. These tools help me backup my workstations and servers on a regular basis. They also help me reconfigure for a new project.

As far as the functionality goes, I haven't had a single issue with it. Rather, I've had some issues with the understandability of the interface. I think if they had someone with expertise in user interfaces to look at this, they could clean up the user interface. There are things that I had to do that aren't even in the normal software package. In other words, I had to go to their website and run some other tool, and I had to run it from the command line. I know how to do that, but I'd rather not have to. Granted, it was something that if I had done things right in the first place, I wouldn't have to do, but still I don't see any reason why they couldn't wrap up all their functionality in one user interface and be done with it.

Once I learned how to use it, I've had no issues with it. I had a little bit of a learning curve in the beginning, but it's my own fault because I didn't read the documentation before I started. I would say the product is easy to use, but I would recommend that anybody using it read the documentation from end to end first.

Stability's not an issue for me because I'm a software developer, kind of a one-man band here, and so I have a server and a number of work stations. So far, I've used this for three months with one server and one workstation, and I haven't run into problems. Its performance seems to be speedy relative to other tools that I've used; they seemed to be quite slow. My impression is that it's quick but I haven't really benchmarked that.

On my servers, for example, I have seven disk drives and I schedule a backup. I finally figured out I should do a backup of each disk drive separately and I scheduled them an hour apart. The backup of a 1 TB disk drive happens well within the hour. It's not an issue anyway because if you schedule seven backups to go in order, they only run one at a time. I had huge amounts of disk drives connected to one server; it would take quite a while, but I don't see a way around that.

Some people use an appliance to perform backups. If you use an appliance on your network, you can have a problem with network usage. By an appliance, I mean a set of disk drives that are in their own little box; it's called network-attached storage and that's what most people use for backup. I would imagine it would perform well, but I can't prove it.

One feature that makes backups easy, once I understood it, is you can set up a backup plan that says, in effect, “backup to the W drive”, where W is the drive letter. You can say, “every Sunday backup to the W drive” and that's a backup plan. Then, you can go to as many work stations as you want and you can tell them to backup to the W drive as defined on that work station. I can use the same backup up plan for five work stations with five different backup drives, as long as I give them all the same label. It makes it very easy to set this up. I can see how this could be rolled out to a much larger installation than mine.

Technical support was excellent. You have several options for how to contact support. You can send them an email but I haven't tried that. The only method I've used is online chat. You open a chat window and wait a few minutes. Someone comes online and you have a conversation with them. They tell you the answer and they stay online until you solved your problem. Then, they send a followup email with a summary. It's essentially a record of your interaction and they ask, "Is your problem solved?" They keep the case open until I verify that the problem is solved. I don't know any better way to do it.

They also have the option that, if I give them permission, they will actually take over and do something. I have used that with other vendors but I haven't used that with them. They asked me if I wanted to do that, I said, "No, I'd rather learn to do this myself." It seems to me, based on the state-of-the-art and other pieces of software that I use, they're right up there. I have talked to five different people and they were all very knowledgeable. I should mention that I've used this with one of my customers. I actually used it with them before I used it here and I was very happy with that.

Previously, I was doing this manually by making copies of hard drives and setting a copy aside. In some cases, if I said, "Oh, I don't need this anymore, making a backup of a disk to a series of DVDs." That worked for different clients. When a client says, "We're done”, I don't have any reason to keep their work online. The one thing I have not tried is to back up anything onto permanent offline storage like a DVD. I have a solution that does a good job at that now, and that's not something that I would schedule.

The strength of Acronis is that you schedule things and you basically don't have to think about it anymore. Whereas, the backup offline, I do that here and there. It's not something I do on a regular basis at all. In a way, I don't care whether they do that well or not, but it looks to me like they would do it. I just have to try it.

Initial setup would be straightforward if I had read the directions. Let's put it that way. I just went ahead and installed it when I got the package. I ran the setup and took the defaults. Here is the way this works: There's a backup manager and you're supposed to manage all your backups from there. Then, there's a backup service that runs on each computer that you're backing up.

What I didn't understand when I set this up is I was installing a different manager on each computer. I had to go to every one to do the backups and I said, "This isn't right, there's got to be a way around." What I found out is, if I had read the directions, they would have said, "Well, you can run the backup manager on a central computer or you can run it in the cloud, or you can run it on each separate computer.” The third option doesn't give you any centralization.

I needed some help from them to change over from what I did and get it all in one computer. They were able to help me in one chat. They told me exactly what to do and when I did that, it worked. All of a sudden, the light bulb lit up about how this works.

Doing what this is capable of doing, the cost of it is in line. I have worked for clients that had big data centers with big racks of blade servers, and so I suppose their server count is in the thousands. One client in particular was using this solution in that setting. Every server has a second network card, so they have two separate networks and one of them is used just for backup because they have very stringent requirements for online service. They have to be online 24/7. They have the production network in the front and behind it they have this other network on which they do backups and redundancy. They're replicating servers all over the place. I think this product is fine, which is what led me to it. I'm essentially using a Ferrari to go to the grocery store, as far as I'm concerned; if you get what I mean.

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The last job I did, I recommended this solution for a modest-sized building company. Their yearly revenues are about $30 million, so they're not a little remodeling contractor. They're building new homes but they're not a big company with hundreds of people, either. They asked me to come in and help them automate their office. They were not doing backups of anything, so they had their whole accounting system on a 10-year old computer with no backup. When I looked at it I said, "Here is a disaster waiting to happen." I set this all up for them.

I do have to go back there and see that it's all working, but it was all working when I left, assuming they didn't disrupt it somehow. I was very happy with how it worked for them. An experienced IT professional could bring this up without any help just by reading the documentation because it's very good. Anyone who isn't an IT professional should hire somebody to figure this out because the documentation is written at a high level. I'm talking about the corporate product, by the way, which I assume is what you're interested in.

For the small construction company, I didn't need the corporate product because they don't have a server, so I used the home product. The home product is much easier to use than the corporate, because the corporate has a lot more choices and things that are squeezed together. The single product they sell for home use they’ve kind of separated from the business one. It's a little bit more complicated and so you have to know how to drive it.

But, my main piece of advice is to hire someone who has either done this before or, at a minimum, is smart enough to read the documentation and set it up for you. My second piece of advice is, move into this in a sensible way. Get it up and running on one server and one workstation and see that you can manage it. Once you've got that working, then add more workstations or more servers to that. It is a solution that, assuming all of your servers are in one place or your workstations are all in the same network, you can run all of your backups - you can run them all - from one place.

In a larger organization, I would say you want to have a workstation that's identified to do this, and you have maybe several people with access to that workstation so they can manage these backups. It has a very good interface. I can see the status of every computer that I'm backing up; it shows me where it is. It shows me when the last backup was done, and if one is in progress. It also shows me the percent completion. I can go in there and click on somebody's computer and say, back it up now.

I can't think of anything that I would add to it. As far as what I need to do, I wouldn't add a thing.

It is perfect for small- to medium-sized business installations. I don't know for a large installation. By large, I mean more than a hundred computers. From what I've seen so far, I could easily manage the backups for five servers and 95 workstations without any problems at all. In my past experience, before such products were available, backing up individual workstations was a nightmare. 20 years ago, there was no way to do this kind of thing. You had to go around to each computer and run a backup. We had IT support staff running around form one computer to another and setting up the backups. Then the owner of the computer would decide, "Oh, my computer is running too slow. Oh, it's running a backup, I don't wanna do that," so they would kill it and then they wouldn't get any more backups. It's just having this level of automation I would consider to be essential. I think they've done a good job at that.

We use the solution for its backup and granular object restore features.

The solution helps us quickly backup clients' data in Office 365 following the move to the cloud from on-prem.

The solution's most valuable feature is cloud backup. Using it, we don't have to go through every mailbox, SharePoint site, or OneDrive account to configure the backup, you can almost just fire at your tenancy and forget.

The solution's reporting feature could be better. There are many false negatives and retriable errors.

We have been using the solution for around eight months.

It is a very stable solution, but we face challenges extracting reports. I rate its stability as an eight.

We have around 90 users in our organization whose Office 365 data is being backed up via Acronis. It is a very scalable solution but depends upon the business requirement. I rate its scalability as a nine.

We previously used on-prem Exchange and used Veeam to back up the on-premises server, we have since moved to hybrid exchange with the mailboxes in the cloud.

We worked on the solution's demo software initially to understand the process. It took us a week to complete it. I rate the process as an eight.

We took help from a third-party vendor for a part of the solution's implementation. Later, we installed the rest of it ourselves. It requires one or two administrators for deployment and maintenance.

It is a low-cost solution. But, its storage cost is high and varies at times. I rate its pricing a two or three.

I advise others to get a demo of the solution in the first instance. Also, they should take timely updates on storage costs. Apart from this, it is easy to use. I rate it as an eight.

My initial experience with Acronis was to backup my email server's contents. This happened in 2008 when my email suddenly went down, but to my surprise, the backup didn't include the email server. However, after restoring everything, I gained confidence in the software and began using it to backup my DC servers.

Acronis Backup is valuable if your data is affected by ransomware, you are able to get it back.

There are times when the backups are slow. A faster backup would be better.

The cloud faces a danger concerning data integrity. Briefly, the threat is to attack the integrity of data stored in the cloud. A hybrid solution that combines cloud storage with local storage on your DC server and provides a secure perimeter to protect data without alterations would be ideal. It's crucial that this solution also synchronizes with the cloud to prevent data from being distorted or stolen.

I have been using Acronis Backup for approximately 10 years.

The solution is reliable and stable.

The price of Acronis Backup could be reduced, it is expensive.

I rate Acronis Backup a ten out of ten.

We were using Acronis Backup for Windows Servers, such as Windows 2003 and 2008 operating systems. We had old Windows systems and we were using Acronis Backup.

Acronis Backup is easy to use.

When you are using enterprise hardware and software that increases over time, there need to be better and more management features. For pure backup software, it is fine, but when it comes to managing a large infrastructure it is lacking.

I have been using Acronis Backup for approximately seven years.

Acronis Backup is not scalable.

We have 10 people in my organization that use the solution.

We are a large company, we are the Steel Authority of India Limited. We span across all of India. We are the biggest steel manufacturers in the country, we have more than 60,000, people working in the company. Generally, I am using Veeam, but there may be other parts of the organization still using Acronis Backup.

The technical support of Acronis Backup is not very responsive in support. We needed it a few times, but it was not very readily available.

We were using Windows backup before Acronis Backup. I use currently using Veeeam backup.

The initial setup is very simple. The full deployment process took half an hour.

We did the implementation ourselves. We have a team of ten that can do the maintenance of the solution.

The return on investment was great because it saved us many times, it saved our lives many times. We lost a machine and we could recover it using Acronis Backup. The return of investment measurement is great.

We were on a perpetual license for Acronis Backup.

I evaluated Cohesity.

We started using this solution because it was recommended by a German company called Siemens.

We no longer use Acronis Backup but we wanted to at that time continue with it. However, Acronis did not want to listen to us to enable us more possibilities for us to consider them. Their response was very cold. We looked into other companies, such as Veeam and Cohesity and we went with Veeam.

I rate Acronis Backup an eight out of ten.

We primarily use this solution for data recovery and backing up complete data centers like image backup and data file servers. We deploy the solution on cloud and on-premises.

When a customer gets any fibre or ransom issues or when their data gets blocked, and we have taken that backup, we can restore the data for customers without losing it.

We usually have images, backup and ransom protection in the solution, and there is advanced management where we can do passing, software inventory, and hardware inventory. We can have a vulnerability assessment of the systems.

We want an application deployment process similar to that in Microsoft SPM, system center, where we can deploy OS. With Microsoft SPM, we can deploy specific applications through the console, a feature missing in Acronis Backup that should be included to improve the solution. Additionally, the reporting can be improved.

We have been using the solution for approximately seven years and are a platinum partner for Acronis globally.

The solution is stable, and we have not had any issues where we cannot restore customer data in over 20 years.

The solution is scalable and can be deployed on over 1,000 servers.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support. I rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. It involves installing the agent, which gets connected to the cloud system. Then, the backup can begin within a few minutes.

The ROI depends on the customers and their investments. The backup solution and anything concerning ROI cannot decline. Still, whenever the customer has issues where the data gets corrupted, it becomes a valuable product because we can restore the data. Most industry people or IT heads do not invest much because they think there is good security and infrastructure, but you never know when you will be compromised because there are thousands of hackers targeting a company. Hence, the solution has ROI.

The licensing is higher than the market, and the other products sold are slightly higher than the others. When people need stable environments, they can keep the data looking at all the assets. More customers pay for it, and we have sold the product for the last seven years and started with a $100 commitment and currently have a $10,000 commitment a month.

The solution has a standard license and standard backups, and they have advanced backups for Oracle or ICP databases. They also have additional products like advanced management, advanced security and email security.

I rate the solution as eight out of ten. Customers choose this solution because Acronis is the only vendor and OEM that provides management and cloud storage in their data centers. It also supports Google Cloud, Microsoft cloud and AWS Cloud and has hybrid support.

We primarily use the solution as a backup.

The good thing is that it's a central console. In that console itself, we have multiple options. You can install a file sync option. With the backup itself, you can take a second backup with the client's own cloud and the universal backup, which is like a complete image of the server backup level. 

That restoration is very good on the Acronis side compared to other products. 

They have their own cloud. Users can work with Azure or AWS as well.

It's very easy to manage. We are an MSSP partner, so we have multiple customers in a single console we can easily manage. There is no need for a server requirement. The server is okay for a backup. If all the backups are in Arcserve, we need a separate server to install the backup. There is an additional cost associated with that approach, however, here, there is no cost. 

The solution is easy to set up.

It is very stable. 

Scalability isn't an issue.

This is a perfect option for an SMB.

Comparatively, depending on the setup, it can be costly. 

On the cloud side, security could always be better.

If you are taking a secondary backup on the cloud, more compression would be better. It would help reduce sizing.

I'm not certain how effective the solution would be for enterprise-level companies. 

We'd like the ability to be able to restore on-premises. Right now, we can only restore on the cloud. 

I've been using the solution for the last five to ten years. 

It's stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We don't have issues with scalability. We're mostly selling to SMB customers, not enterprises. It can scale for their purposes. Typically companies in the category we work with have 50 to 100 users, or maybe a maximum of 200 users.

Normally, we get support from our team. 

Normally, we used to provide Veeam as well. That said, Veeam has a completely different product and a different portfolio. They have a different cloud-based option, and Veeam doesn't have a cloud-based option. Which we would use would depend on the client's needs. Both products are good. If a client has multiple servers for backing up, Acronis is best. The way they are priced is completely different as well. As an MSSP partner, we typically get good pricing with Acronis. We don't have the same relationship with Veeam.

This product is very straightforward to set up. It's not a complex process. 

We are an MSSP partner for the Acronis Cloud, so we are getting a good price.

We have a lot of customers on Acronis right now. 

I'm handling the presales, so I'm involved with implementations in all of the environments. 

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I use the product to protect key servers and workstations. We run mission critical servers where downtime cannot be afforded. Acronis is the only solution I trust to get us back up and running after a major catastrophe.

It has saved us from certain financial ruin after important servers containing financial data were stolen during a robbery. We were able to restore backups to new hardware and carry on with business as usual.

Incremental image backups are the most valuable part of the software. Using this feature we are able to restore to any previous backup. It is more than file backup, it backs up the entire disk, containig operating system, software and data. By restoring an image to a new hard drive, we can run the restore and reboot, and immediately be back in business.

Over the years they seem to have changed the interface to be more of a graphical interface and they have omitted the ability to use the interface using a keyboard only. When you are in a data center environment and you don't have a mouse with you, or for some reason the mouse is not working and you need to restore, it is extremely difficult/impossible. 

If you don't have a mouse, there seems to be no way to move between the icons. In the old days it was compulsory to design software interfaces that were compatible with both the keyboard and mouse. You could press 'Alt-R' for restore and 'Alt-B' for backup, or something like that. Those functions have been removed from the product and it's very frustrating.

Another one feature I would like to see added is an agent to back up MySQL databases as well. They've got an agent to back up Microsoft SQL, but there is not an agent to back up MySQL databases.

I have been using Acronis Backup for more than 20 years.

Acronis Backup is very stable. I'm using it for critical servers and workstations — it runs really well.

It's very easy to add more machines. You can install as many as your license allows.

I would say they're very supportive and really helpful. The guy even came up to our site to help and gave us some assistance and training as well. I can't complain about that at all.

I switched 20 years ago, so whatever I used before Acronis would not be not relevant now.

The TrueImage versions are super easy to install. The initial setup is really easy if you know what you're doing. You just have to download it from the web, run it, and install it. It's very straightforward, there's nothing really difficult about it. The only little technical bit comes with the Cyber Cloud versions where you now have to install a Cyber Cloud console, and then you have to create a backup job and you have to assign the backup job to a computer. For an average person, that would be slightly tricky to do, whereas a reseller or a service provider could easily do that.

Deployment on one machine only takes a few minutes. You literally select the product you're going to install from the cyber console, download the agent, install the agent on the computer, create the backup job, and then link the backup job to the agent. It probably takes about 10 minutes to set up the whole thing.

We do all installations ourselves, but I had to get support from Acronis initially to get up to speed on all the features. They are really professional and gave all assistance where required.

Massive peace of mind and the certain knowledge that we can recover from any disaster goes way beyond the cost of the product.

The installation fees are very reasonable and the monthly/annual licensing fees are minimal for the features you get.

I looked at VeeAm, Backup Exec, Solarwinds and Redstor. Veeam requires the installation of SQL even on workstations. In my experience this impacted overall performance of workstations. Backup Exec I found frustrating to administer and Solarwinds, although fantastic for File Backups and Office365, is not ideal for image backups. The bare metal restore (BMR) for Solarwinds is extremely basic and only restores to the first available SATA drive it finds. I accidentally overwrote important data using Solarwinds BMR since it does not warn you or give you an option to choose a destination drive for the restore. And after the BMR the machine did not want to boot, meaning I could not rely on the solution in times of crisis. Redstor is a great product and works well, but it is complicated to get to know and even after a course on it, I still felt a bit lost. Plus it was really expensive compared to Acronis.

Acronis now includes a feature called Cyber Protect, which performs anti-malware scanning and protects everything on your system. It can also check for Microsoft patches and helps you to stay updated and protected. It has a very accurate disk health monitor that could warn you of imminent drive failure. It also protects the integrity of your online backups against ransomware. From start to finish, not only does it protect your hard drive, it protects the integrity of the backups as well.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. You might require assistance to create backup plans and to link them to backup agents, and also for the fact that it doesn't have the ability work without a mouse.