Acronis Backup 12.5 - Our Story
December 08, 2017
Acronis Backup 12.5 - Our Story
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Backup 12.5 Standard,
Overall Satisfaction with Acronis Backup
We adopted Acronis Backup V12.5 when we upgraded our VMWare environment. We needed a solution to backup all of the VMs and then replicate the image to an off-site location. It is managed by the IT department and we hope to replace the Symantec BackupExec system that is/was being used.
- You can administer all of your backups from a single browser-based GUI. No matter what the instance of Acronis is - local agent install on a physical device .... a VM on a host or even an Apple device. Alerts can be set for errors or warnings for admins to act upon if necessary.
- Restores can be undertaken in a number of ways which is really useful. You can restore a whole VM to the same host or a new one. You can convert physical machines to a VM and a very useful feature is the ability to dive into the backup file and pluck individual files and thus restore single files quickly - good for file servers etc.
- One of the requirements was to have the ability to replicate the backup files to an off-site location - This can be set up easily within the backup plan eliminating the need (for us at least) for tape-based solutions.
- Stability - Although we have seen improvements in the recent later releases, we did experience stability issues in the not too distant past.
- We have seen regular warning messages whilst attempting VM backups - "An error occurred while quiescing the virtual machine".
- Upon contacting Acronis support - we were told this is a VMware issue...not much help. The resolution? Install the Acronis agent on the VM locally.
- This creates a non-standard rollout across your estate. I do not know why this happens to one VM over another but it would be good to get this resolved.
- We have a Linux appliance based Acronis solution. We have needed to contact Acronis support on a number of occasions for some support and the Acronis 1st level support teams are very much Windows based. They do not have much experience on the Linux appliance version of their system.
- If you do go down the Linux platform with your Acronis - make sure you have sufficient in house Linux skills to maintain and perform upgrades.
- We have found that this was a much more cost-effective solution than our Symantec platform. The fact we could purchase a single VM 'host' license meant that we could back up every VM on that host - irrespective of how many VMs there were.
- The backup management can now be administered centrally - this allows easy remote access from technicians from anywhere within our business.
- Separate and distinct users can also be configured to add a much needed security layer to the backup management process. This was lacking in the previous Symantec model we had.
We had in place a Symantec Backup Exec (2014) solution in place - this was running on a physical device with an attached tape library. This would be perfect for a smaller company needing cost-effective off-site storage.
But for us, this had a number of limitations:
1) User accountability - all user's actions within the backup system were untraceable as everything was complete as the generic user
2) Our estate had moved to a mainly virtual platform and installing agents onto each VM was not cost effective
3) Offsite replication was not an easy setup on the Symantec version we had
Acronis offered us a competitive price if we showed we were replacing a competitor's product to reinforce the business decision.