Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office review: Top-tier do-it-all PC backup

Price When Reviewed

$49.99

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Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (nee True Image) is with out query probably the most complete suite of utilities for conserving your pc backed up and safe. It’s not even notably shut the truth is.

Marrying anti-malware and backup, as Cyber Protect Home Office does, may appear an odd alternative at first. However, the power to fireside off a backup or shut off entry to earlier backups when malware is detected makes a complete lot of sense.

I used to be a bit skeptical when the corporate first began down this path, now I’m utterly on board. 

Further studying: See our roundup of the best Windows backup software to study competing merchandise.

What are Acronis Cyber Protect’s options?

There’s quite a bit to cowl in a program as complete as Cyber Protect Home Office. I’ll get to the malware safety in a bit, however first let’s speak about backup. The program creates picture information from drives or partitions, in addition to chosen information and folders. These may be full (every little thing), incremental (every little thing because the final backup), or differential (every little thing because the preliminary backup). 

You may also again up information out of your cellphone or information from distant shared-network places, and make use of Blockchain to notarize backed-up information with the premium model.

Cyber Protect Home Office allows you to save backup jobs and schedule them, mechanically (or manually) culls older backups when house runs low, splits backups, copies sector-by-sector or data-only, validates backup publish facto, runs instructions pre- and post-operation, and much more. In quick, nearly each choice invented by the backup group has been carried out.

The program additionally backs as much as practically any kind of media or location: native drives, community locations, the 1TB of cloud storage supplied by Acronis with some subscriptions, and even optical — keep in mind CDs and DVDs? They’re nonetheless in use! If you’re tremendous old-school, sorry, tape shouldn’t be supported. 

Cyber Protect Home Office will optionally place a model of this system on detachable media to be used throughout restore (Acronis calls it “recovery”) operations — i.e. create a catastrophe restoration boot disk.

Many folks conflate sync with backup, and whereas they’ve similarities, they’re not the identical operation. Backups are supposed to be immutable, remaining obtainable nicely into the long run so you’ll be able to retreat to older variations and information. Syncs evolve and customarily replicate the present state of your information.

You can futz sync into backup with some applications by implementing versioning — i.e., saving older variations of information fairly than deleting them, and never mirroring deletions from the supply.

Acronis’s sync is two-way with the one choice being whether or not it’s synced to Acronis Cloud first (in the event you opted for the service), fairly than the vacation spot, assuming the vacation spot isn’t Acronis Cloud to start with.

The motive I mentioned the distinction between sync and backup is as a result of Cyber Protect Home Office options sync jobs as a separate perform — correctly. This permits you to synchronize information between your native PC, Acronis Cloud, and your cell units. Yes, as talked about, Cyber Protect Home Office provides Android and iOS purchasers as nicely. See beneath.

Other associated and tangential options embrace hardware-independent restoration media (USB/optical), disk cloning, an OEM-like restoration partition (boot time restore of your authentic OS state out of your inner drive) creator, a system cleanup instrument (suppose CCLeaner), and a secure-erase utility.

Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office sports activities a clear, engaging interface, and is simple to make use of — when you’re accustomed to it. It’s not amazingly intuitive with regards to group and operation, however a half hour kicking the tires and you need to be good to go. Assuming you’re acquainted with fundamental backup ideas.

How efficient is Acronis Cyber Protects malware safety?

A number of years in the past Acronis acknowledged a gap out there as a consequence of a spate of ransomware assaults, and added ransomware safety to its flagship software program’s bag of tips.

Don’t pooh-pooh ransomware as one thing that occurs to another person. It occurred to me. Trust me, it’s on the market and with out backups, I’d’ve been royally hosed.

Acronis subsequently expanded anti-malware capabilities to guard towards normal threats, malicious web sites, and different dangerous conduct akin to code injection into apps. This clearly requires real-time intervention — an enormous addition again in 2021.   

To check Cyber Protect Home Office’s anti-malware skills I ran the assessments on the WICAR.ORG web site and surfed some identified dangerous areas of the online. Cyber Protect Home Office caught every little thing. As efficient because it proved, real-time safety is non-obligatory and could also be turned off.

How a lot does Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office value?

Acronis thoughtfully offers a 30-day trial that you should utilize to check out this system. Beyond that, it’s $50 for a one-year subscription sans on-line storage (Essentials), $55 per 12 months for Advanced with 50GB of storage (sufficient for many important, non-media information) and extra malware options, and $125 for Premium with 1TB of storage, which ought to be sufficient for many of your stuff excluding video. A full comparability is a obtainable here.

You’re mainly paying $75 per 12 months for 1TB of storage with Cyber Protect Home Office, which is just a bit greater than OneDrive’s 1TB plan. However, OneDrive consists of Microsoft Office, each native and on-line.

Which brings me to cloud storage managers akin to CloudMounter and Mountain Duck. These will combine any variety of on-line storage companies, together with cheaper S3-compatible companies, into Windows Explorer as pseudo local drives. You can then use the $50 model of Cyber Protect Home Office (or every other backup software program) to again as much as them and avoid wasting coin.

Note that there are Enterprise-level variations of Cyber Protect obtainable as nicely.

How quick is Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office?

Generally talking, Cyber Protect Home Office is as fast because it will get. I ran backup jobs to exterior and inner SSDs, a NAS field (2.5Gbps), wrote folders to optical (single BD-R/M-Disc), and to Acronis Cloud. All proceeded as shortly as you possibly can ask given every bandwidth, and with out incident. I hate incidents and have a tendency to not belief backup software program that suffers them. 

On the opposite hand, I did have some slight points with the Linux boot disc, though the Windows PE model was A-OK.

My solely actual efficiency gripe is that the primary interface is fairly sluggish to launch. No doubt due the massive variety of processes spawned by the varied elements, to not point out connecting to Acronis Cloud.

As to processes… Cyber Protect Home Office has a sprawling system footprint that spawns a whopping 12 of them (proven above). I observed little impression on system efficiency aside from this system boot time, and fashionable PCs akin to my AMD Ryzen check mattress ought to have the ability to deal with it, however for older legacy {hardware} it could be a pressure. Cyber Protect Home Office additionally takes up a considerable 1GB of disk house.

Should you purchase Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office?

Given its broad capabilities, Cyber Protect Home workplace is a reasonably whole lot. You may go for one other vendor with cheaper on-line storage, however Acronis Cloud is built-in and I’ll admit, I discovered it very useful. Bottom line: If you’re on the lookout for a complete, set-it-and-forget-it data-safety resolution, I do know of nothing higher, or comparable for that matter.  

Note: Our software program testing is essentially restricted as a consequence of time and tools constraints. We report any concern skilled traditionally or throughout testing for the article; nonetheless, you must analysis consumer boards for data on points different customers might have skilled. This applies to all software program.