Acronis Files Connect is awesome
February 14, 2018

Acronis Files Connect is awesome

Ryan Stasel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Acronis Files Connect

We're a Journalism School that have several hundred Macs. Traditionally, we'd use Apple servers with Xsan or some other local storage, but we wanted to centralize our storage and servers to VMs and the campus Netapps. Apple, for whatever reason, hasn't ported Spotlight search to some SMB system, or integrated with Windows Search, so search just doesn't work right over SMB, let alone things like Office apps overwriting permissions, etc.

Acronis Files Connect allowed us to migrate our storage to a central VM running 2012R2, and have storage on the Netapps (in the form of a couple LUNs), and share that data out over both SMB for Windows users, and AFP for Mac users. And all the annoying things that Apple's native AFP server used to do (ghost users, permission overwrites, etc) can be fixed/blocked/etc with Acronis. It's pretty amazing. Oh, and Search works!
  • Spotlight Search
  • Mac Connectivity
  • Fixing bad behavior of Mac Office, Adobe Apps, etc.
  • Would love some type of remote administration (web interface, Mac app, whatever)
  • Some logging level between "OH GOD, TOO MUCH" and the "mediocre" default
  • Been a great ROI. We wouldn't be able to function without it, given how many Mac users we have.
If you have enough Mac clients working off a server, and they need search, or have been causing issues with Office docs, then this is definitely for you. Even if it's just a few users, the price of a small license is quite reasonable.

If you don't have these issues, I wouldn't bother. The Mac does SMB "relatively" well.