Acronis Backup Cloud - the best bang for your buck for backup
Updated May 18, 2018

Acronis Backup Cloud - the best bang for your buck for backup

Dan Gospe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with Acronis Backup Cloud

DMI Networking is a managed service provider for dentists, with a national presence. We use Acronis Backup Cloud to back up servers and assorted devices, and we absolutely love it.

When we switched from eFolder, we saved over $1500 per month in our backup, and we received more features than we were getting before. Acronis Backup Cloud lets us virtualize a server from the backup media, which brings up dental practices in less than 15 minutes, as opposed to the many hours needed to do a complete restore.

I was the person who chose Acronis Backup Cloud and negotiated the contract with them. I also provide the backup solution to clients and am one of two people here who implement it for them.
  • Quick Virtualization. Acronis can virtualize most systems and get you back up in 15-30 minutes.
  • Encryption of Backups. You own the encryption key, and Acronis doesn't - so not even Acronis employees can get into your cloud data. Encryption meets all HIPAA requirements for data protection.
  • Easy to resell. You can create accounts for individuals outside of the company to allow them access to their backup console. It's very easy to set up, and clients are happy with how easy it is to use.
  • The website is pretty slow and will kick you off sometimes. I know they are working on this. For now, this is the biggest problem we have with Acronis.
  • Their support team isn't great. It can take a while to get an issue resolved, although issues do not happen frequently.
  • ROI has been huge. The cost is incredibly cheap, and we saved $1500/month by switching.
  • With a heavy impact on profits, we're able to bundle this backup plan into our basic server management plans with no additional cost, which raises the value of our offerings significantly.
Acronis Backup Cloud has more features than eFolder, and is less than 1/3rd of the cost. In terms of restores, it's faster than eFolder if you use the local component. The restoration component is much better than Carbonite's, which has a tendency to drop connection midway through a file download. Acronis lets you restore to original locations, to a new location on the same device, or just as a download through your browser. Acronis Backup Cloud beats everything else we've tried, and it's unbelievable how affordable it is.
Acronis Backup Cloud is suited for backing up Windows Servers. Downtime is greatly decreased by using their virtualization options. You will need a Hyper-V enabled computer to virtualize, though, but this can be one of your general-use workstations. A Windows 10 Pro machine with 16 GB of RAM would do it for you.

Or, if you have Macs that need to be backed up, you can do that as well. You can grab either full volume images, or files/folders.

I can't really think of a scenario that you would not want Acronis Backup Cloud, except pre-Server 2012 OS's, since virtualization isn't supported on those older systems.

Using Acronis Backup Cloud

6 - IT support technicians use Acronis Backup Cloud to monitor our clients' backups. Also, as COO I deploy this software to our various clients.
6 - To be efficient at using Acronis Backup Cloud, you should have IT experience and understand networking. It's good to know how to configure a NAS, and to determine what kind of backup plan will work with the space available. If you do a non-supported solution such as drive-swapping, then you should also know some Windows scripting to make it work.
  • Disaster Recovery - if a server goes down, you can virtualize from your backup media and be up in about 30 minutes.
  • Cloud backup with long retention - if you save over a file or an employee accidentally deletes one, you have 6 months to get your old version back.
  • The encryption on the backup complies with HIPAA and NIST requirements for security, so this product is great for the medical or financial industries.
  • With the program, you can add scripts to the backup job to run before backup and after backup, so through the software itself we can stop the SQL database prior to backup, and restart it once it's done.
  • It was helpful to be able to back up a Mac over the network from a Windows Server onto a NAS.
  • We will eventually look at the file sharing / dropbox style service that ABC provides.
  • We will continue to use new features as they come out. They update this software quite frequently.
The cost savings we realized from moving to this software has us hooked - it does everything we need it to do on a very high level (virtualization, for example) and is very low cost for us.

Evaluating Backup Cloud and Competitors

Yes - We replaced eFolder for file/folder backup, and ShadowProtect for our image-based virtualizable backup. In both cases, the cost savings were significant. We were also finding support at eFolder to be diminishing in quality.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Vendor Reputation
The single most important factor for this product is the fact that it can virtualize your backup media, reducing downtime to about 20-30 minutes instead of several hours on a standard image-based backup utility.
We would have done it sooner