Acronis Cyber Protect Reviews

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 use this solution to basically backup anything. Servers, physical or virtual, and also some critical workstations. We can backup as emails or as folders. We are partners with Acronis and I'm the general manager.

The solution has helped us because it supports a lot of platforms and we don't have to install anything at our end in terms of a server and the like. Everything is on the cloud and that's a good start for us. 

The administration is pretty flexible in terms of defining a multi-tenant type of setup. They've come up with a new feature this year, an anti-malware solution. It's focused for MSPs and enables clients and users to be setup to access only one customer or customers. The idea is great although it still needs some work. They also have a notary application to sign files as well as support for Office 365 and even Google Apps backup. We're able to back up mailboxes and OneDrive and SharePoint, things like that.

We have issues with the SQL databases which are supported but not so successfully, it's a little shaky. It seems to tie up the use of the database, locking it to some extent. The big issue is that users are not able to access the databases when it's doing a backup. Some of our customers work around the clock and need continual access. The SQL backups have to work better so that they have MySQL or Maria support. We still use CloudBerry sometimes and it doesn't have that issue. It does the backup without tying up the database and it's still accessible to the user. That's something that Acronis have to improve. The other is the antimalware application, which is good in theory, but doesn't work so well. It uses a lot of resources and causes issues with some applications. That occurred when we switched from Webroot to Acronis Antimalware. In some instances, we had to go back to Webroot. There are some great concepts but not always such great executions. 

I've been using this solution for over a year. 

It took us a couple of months to fine-tune the solution. Since then it's been fine, there's a dashboard where you can see in a snapshot how the backup is working and it's going well.

The solution is scalable and as you grow, you just move to a different price tier. We have one person monitoring the solution. We hope to increase use in the future. 

Technical support is not good. Support is often delayed because we don't have real-time support or the option of chat, which is not available yet. They are aware there's an issue and are hiring more support staff but my experience was not that good.  

There were some issues with the initial setup, we chose Google for storage and when it came to disaster recovery, it didn't work so I had to go back and redo everything again using Acronis Cloud instead. We lost some time as a result. I did the implementation but we had some support from Acronis. 

Our licensing costs are around $1,000 per month and that includes storage. We have around 15 terabytes. Everyone looks for better pricing, but it's not that bad. They have changed the licensing three times since we started working with them. They're looking to make things simple. The idea is to use less license numbers. Then there's the transparency; we pay according to time on the platform and would like to know the cost, but it's not available. We get the invoice and by then it's too late. We need the information up front. 

With all the new features being added, the solution is becoming heavy in its use of resources. It's important to be aware of that because it affects the running of some applications. And that's not good because if you implement a security solution, you have to make it safer. 

The concepts are there but the execution is not that good so I would rate it a seven out of 10. 

It has the ability to backup and move to a different machine if the machine dies. I haven't been able to use this feature yet, but I know it will come in handy. The ability to move from one machine to another for backup if a machine completely fails. We have a backup of not only the machine, i.e., the hard drive and data, but we also have the ability to recover to a new piece of equipment fairly quickly. That's one of the more important features.

It makes a full image of the hard drive. If a hard drive fails, all we do is recover to another hard drive. We just pop in the hard drive and that's very fast as well. Speed and the ease in which we recover full hard drives are valuable features.

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Some of the default settings out-of-the-box should already be set up for the novice user. For instance, the warnings that say a hard drive has bad sectors and stops the backup from performing.

My suggestion would be to still give the warnings that there are bad sectors on the hard drive, but continue to backup. It could then offer the option of whether to stop backups, or stop them from performing.

During my first experience with backing up, I ended up coming across an error and the solution was to mark that checkbox that said, "Skip bad sector warnings." I didn't know that existed. It would just make it easier for first time users if no matter what, it would make a backup and just give you the warnings.

I wouldn't say we had stability issues as much as I would say that we have errors that may or may not affect the backup. For instance, we were backing up a computer that uses Windows 7 Embedded. It warned me that this would probably not work, but it did. I don't know if that's a stability issue or if that's just making sure of backup success.

It makes a full image of the hard drive. If a hard drive fails, all we do is recover to another hard drive. We just pop in the hard drive and that's very fast as well. Speed and the ease in which we recover full hard drives are valuable features.

Our facility is small such that scalability is not a problem.

I did use technical support and I give it the highest rating. The technical support we received when doing a recovery handled our questions. They were able to resolve any questions that we had.

We did use Backup Exec. It belonged to Symantec at the time. Now it's Veritas. The reason we switched was because I experienced firsthand what Acronis could do using the Western Digital version, the free version, or the version that comes with Western Digital drives. I was very impressed.

I went deeper, got into Acronis, and it was recommended by a company from whom we purchase equipment. It's just a solid product in my experience.

The setup complexity was medium. The single disk is easy. The advanced version for multiple computers was medium in complexity.

It has already paid off itself in the first few months that we implemented it.

I tried Clonezilla and Backup Exec.

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Watch out for that “Skip bad sectors” setting if you plan on running this software unattended. Don't hesitate to call Acronis support. They will be ready and willing to help you right away.

The software warned Windows 7 Embedded was not supported, yet the backup/restore still worked despite the warning I was given.

It makes a full image of the hard drive. If a hard drive fails, all we do is recover to another hard drive. We just pop in the hard drive and that's very fast as well. Speed and the ease in which we recover full hard drives are valuable features.

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.

It is used for backup. In terms of deployment, it has got the capability of both. It can be on-premise and on the cloud.

Acronis is a flexible solution. It can back up workstations, endpoints, and even your virtual environments and cloud-based environments. So, we can do the backup of the whole gamut of products.

We can also do instantaneous recovery of individual items, files, documents, etc. It also has good pricing and support.

I would like to have more cybersecurity integration to properly round up the product and its offering. In terms of cybersecurity, if the offerings can be more versatile so that it is not just a backup solution, it would be great. Some addition to cybersecurity would really be helpful so that it becomes a kind of a suite of products. Backup and recovery form a part of the broader security strategy. Its integration with other cybersecurity solutions would provide proper visibility to not just your cybersecurity dashboard but also to all of your backups. You would have a pretty good view of the entire security landscape that you are managing.

It should definitely be more stable, and it should support larger platforms. It can maybe support cross-cloud implementations.

I have been using this solution for at least five years.

It is stable, but it could be more stable.

It is scalable for medium to large environments but not for very large environments.

So far, we have provided this solution to about 15 to 25 customers. 

Technical support from Acronis is pretty good. It is world-class.

It has got very good and broad support.

Its installation is not very difficult. It is pretty straightforward. With a little guidance from the manuals and other resources, a regular skilled engineer can easily perform the installation. Of course, it is not suitable for a layman.

We have two engineers supporting it. We also have one Sales and Account Management person for managing the plans.

Its price is quite friendly on the pocket. You need to pay the licensing cost upfront, and then the support charges are on an annual basis.

I would definitely recommend Acronis to those who are starting out on the backup and recovery or want to migrate to and are looking for a fine-grain and stable solution. The good part is that you can still have the backup on the cloud. So, that would also take care of your offsite backup.

I don't have many comparison points. Based on whatever experience I've had on Acronis, I would rate it a nine out of 10.

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.

Our customers primarily use the solution for backup purposes, focusing on gaining insights into the backup process. They seek real insights into the backups, determining whether the images are virus-influenced. The key objective is to identify clean images that can be restored, allowing for a smooth restart of production. Restoring an infected version could lead to the point where the product environment gets infected and goes down. It helps with both backup and cybersecurity. 

From my perspective, the most valuable features in Acronis Cyber Protect include ransomware protection and antivirus. These features not only add significant value but also play a crucial role in closing deals. When selling backup for Microsoft 365, these security features, like ransomware protection and antivirus, serve as a starting point to offer backup and protection.

Integrating backup and antivirus in one platform has significantly enhanced data protection for our customers. It uses a single agent for both backup and preventing ransomware attacks. This approach eliminates the need for different agents installed on end-user computers, addressing performance concerns.

For cybersecurity needs, the patch management feature in Acronis Cyber Protect has proven highly effective. It comes in handy when new patches are released, particularly for third-party applications that are not Windows-based. Third-party applications like Chrome may have vulnerabilities, and Acronis Cyber Protect enables the easy deployment of updates to ensure end-users are running the latest versions.

The tool's dashboard for daily operations is useful, but I find that it could benefit from enhancements, particularly in terms of reporting. While exporting reports, the format is not fancy as it appears on the dashboard. The exported files are typically in Excel CSV or PDF format. 

I don't know if this feature is already there or not, but when doing a backup from Microsoft 365, We have groups distribution list groups where we list all the users that we need to have the backup for. So if there's a way that we can pull the members of the group to be taken for a certain backup plan, that will be really because otherwise, I need to go and look for the users one by one, and it doesn't help when you have 500 or 1000 users.

One feature that I would like to see in the product is the ability to automatically uninstall or remove devices from the portal when they have been off for more than 30 days. Currently, there is a case where the device being off for an extended period indicates the employee has likely resigned.

I have been working with the product for more than three years. 

The tool is stable. 

The product is scalable. 

The product's technical support is helpful. 

Positive

I have used Veeam and Commvault. 

There's good documentation on the Acronis Cyber Protect website on how to do things, plus the training courses that we took from its portal. They really help. We also have support from the product's presales engineers. They always support us whenever we run into a problem.

For a Microsoft 365 backup plan, the deployment process typically takes around half an hour, where we explain to the customer how things are done. However, the duration of backup plans involving endpoint devices with Acronis Cyber Protect varies based on the organization's size.

A considerable amount of resources is needed for massive deployments in large organizations. This is particularly true when the devices are not centralized in a managed platform, meaning they are not joined to an active directory or MDM solution. In such cases, the tool's agent must be installed on each device individually, or network scanning may be attempted, but it often proves ineffective. Joining the devices to an MDM or an active directory streamlines the deployment process. Otherwise, having a list of users and installing the agent individually for each one becomes necessary.

We had two to three instances where the users had complained that the agents made the systems slow. 

The product's ROI comes at a great value. 

The tool is cheap compared to other products. 

I rate the product a seven out of ten. 

More reliability of backups and security.

The configuration of automatic backups and the full image of the hard drive, so in case something happens I can recover the full hard drive.

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Installation could be easier.

The stability is a really good characteristic. Even if the PC is off, the software tries to apply the backup.

No, the application has very good support. The only difficulty is in the security of each computer login. In general, the application is excellent.

The knowledge is excellent from the support people. The only difficulty is regarding the support hours, because they are a long way from us in terms of time zones.

Not myself. But at this company they had Carbonite, a really bad application. We switched because of this application's features that permit us to do many things.

It was difficult because of the security logins that are different for each computer.

This application, which we bought through PC MALL, was expensive. A month later I discovered the price was totally different. I already told fiends the application works very well, but they should buy it at a different price than we paid.

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Barracuda Backup and EaseUS Todo Backup.

Proceed with it, it's a good application; just check the price.

Also, I can explain to my friends the “issues” I have had during the installation so it can be implemented faster and more easily.