Acronis Cyber Protect Reviews

We are ensuring our data's safety by backing it up in both Acronis' cloud and on-premise servers. Additionally, we have established a partnership with Acronis to become resellers in the Jordanian market. This enables us to benefit from our partnership and offer Acronis products to customers.

Acronis Backup is of excellent quality, highly user-friendly, and supports nearly all platforms, databases, and hypervisors. Subscription options for both on-premise and cloud-based versions are available, with each providing varied options such as workload, gigabyte, and service provider. 

Acronis natively integrates backup and cybersecurity, simplifying management and automation in one console, which helps us and our customers to keep our data secure and safe with a trustable solution like Acronis. A combination of high-performance computing, universal software-defined storage, and flexible networking allows us to grow the business without complexity concerns.

Since the last version, everything has been improved. Each update Acronis releases brings better performance, recovery, and backup. Acronis also fixed existing errors and added new compatibility. With every new version, the solution continues to get better and better.

The solution's software is highly secure, with an anti-Malware and anti-ransomware engine, plus additional features such as vulnerability assessment, remote management, and remote control. Malware scanning is integrated into the single agent for added convenience. All in all, this is an impressive product and I highly recommend it.

Acronis Backup is easy to use and we've had no issues with it in the years we've been using Acronis; the backups and recoveries are rock solid and it's great for transitioning between physical to physical, virtual to virtual, physical to virtual, and virtual to physical.

The pricing is significantly higher than it was last year, which is understandable since they have introduced new technology, such as transitioning from backup to cybersecurity. This has required a large investment in development, so it is reasonable for Acronis to raise the price. However, existing customers may be taken aback by the sudden price increase when they renew their accounts or licenses.

Talking about the Acronis Service Provider platform, I wish Acronis had a feature that would allow me to set an expiry date for created customers and issued licenses on both the "Per Workload" and "Per Gigabyte" options. This way, I could receive a reminder when a customer's subscription is about to expire without the need to integrate third-party tools. Unfortunately, this is not available in the service provider portal. This would be extremely helpful for service providers and should be included in the future.

Since Acronis stopped selling perpetual licenses, Acronis should take action to ensure that perpetual licenses are not functional if customers do not renew them. They should also strive to set reasonable renewal prices for perpetual licenses and create a mechanism to help us and customers who want to upgrade their licenses to subscription or service providers without being burdened with an exorbitant fee. It is clear that Acronis must review its pricing model and create a system that will make it easier for customers to upgrade without breaking the bank. We're losing customers due to the fact that there is a huge gap between renewing perpetual licenses and subscription licenses. On the other hand, perpetual licenses, which are valid for life, do not require renewal for the software to continue working. Therefore, customers may be hesitant to renew maintenance support for these licenses due to the higher cost even if they won't get any updates or support, but many of them still say that the software is stable enough for them and they don't need to renew. However, with a reasonable price, many customers are now renewing. With these significant price increases for their perpetual license renewal, I found it to be unreasonable. However, I have no issues with their subscription and service provider models. Acronis needs to find a way to address the price increases for their perpetual licenses.

I have been using the solution for more than 10 years.

I have a lot of customers who never call me with complaints about Acronis. I proactively reach out and ask if they are having any issues with Acronis; they always tell me that the solution is very stable and that the installation, scheduling, and verification processes all work as expected. Acronis updates are solid and address compatibility issues and error correction.

Acronis is a scalable solution, there are no worries about scalability. They always listen to thousands of customers of all sizes. A combination of high-performance computing, universal software-defined storage, and flexible networking allows you to grow the business without complexity concerns. 

The support and maintenance services at Acronis are the best I have ever encountered. When I open a support case or request maintenance, I hear back in two to three minutes, and for more major or critical matters, the response time is from three to seven days. Even when I reach out to Acronis by email, the staff is prompt to respond.

No matter who we are talking to, customers or competitors, we always offer advice on using Acronis. In my opinion, Acronis is the best software available on the market, better than other options such as Veeam Backup and Replication, Commvault Complete Data Protection, Symantec Online Backup, and Veritas NetBackup. We always suggest that customers use Acronis, and it is a reliable and solid option that we use ourselves in our company.

Positive

I used many Backup solutions, but Acronis has an all-in-one solution that addresses security, simplicity, and stability for backup and recovery.

Thanks to Acronis, setting it up is incredibly easy. Even for someone with no technical experience, it's a breeze. As a partner, when I introduce the product to customers, it only takes me an hour or two to explain how it works. Acronis has a user-friendly interface that can be operated in just a few steps.

The amount of time needed to deploy in larger environments typically takes up to five hours, depending on the number of users, machines, and servers involved. For example, it took less than five hours to deploy Acronis on 20 servers, 50 virtual machines, and 100 workstations using the tools provided by Acronis such as unattended installation and network Discovery.

I don't need many resources to install Acronis Backup. Generally, the basic requirements for either a server or PC are enough. Acronis covers almost all platforms so there are no special requirements. The amount of space needed for installation is also not excessive.

We usually implement Acronis through our sales and technical teams, however; when the Acronis team is needed, they are experts and helpful.

For most companies, data is the most valuable asset: financial statements, customer databases, ERP systems, emails, etc. When planning for disasters, businesses must ask themselves several questions. “Should we protect our data?” “Can we rebuild without that data?” “How long do we have to rebuild before customers, suppliers, and investors go elsewhere?” The answer is Backup and Disaster Recovery. The best way is to demonstrate that disaster recovery is not with cost — but an investment with a positive ROI.

The math for the rate of return is a bit complicated. 

The pricing has increased, however, I believe it is still reasonable compared to other products. Acronis offers unique features that make it stand out from the competition. I see with Acronis, you will get what you paid for.

Acronis licensing module is very good and easy, you don't have to struggle choosing between licenses.

The setup is very simple, they avoid any setup complexity. One setup file will cover all your platforms.

I evaluated many solutions, Acronis is the best of them from my opinion.

Acronis is not just a backup solution, it is truly a cybersecurity solution. In Addition, they have many other solutions such as:

• Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud
• Acronis Disaster Recovery
• Acronis Cyber Infrastructure
• Acronis Cyber Protect Connect
• Acronis DeviceLock DLP
• Advanced Email Security
• Acronis Snap Deploy
• Acronis Disk Director
• And More...

I've been using Acronis Backup for backups primarily.

It's a good solution for backing up items.

The initial setup is easy.

The solution is stable and reliable. 

I have no suggestions for improvements as I have only used the product for a month and have yet to really discover all of its aspects.

I've been using the solution for just one month.

The solution is quite stable. So far, there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

I haven't attempted to scale the product. We haven't had a chance to look at it yet.

We haven't reached out to technical support yet. We only have used the product for a month.

We did previously use other backup solutions. We switched to Acronis as we wanted to try something new. 

We found the initial setup to be straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex or difficult. However, I am not sure how long the deployment itself took. We had ten people working on it. 

We did the implementation ourselves without the help of any consultants or integrators. 

We have a one-year license for the product, however, I can't speak to the exact cost.

We're a customer and end-user.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we use. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

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.

For clients utilizing OneDrive within Microsoft 365, having an online backup solution like Acronis is imperative. It allows you to recover data in such scenarios or instances where data has been accidentally deleted.

One of its most valuable aspects is its user-friendly interface. It's straightforward for clients to manage their assets independently, which might be convenient for them.

The licensing approach becomes intricate when dealing with SharePoint. Unlike individual user data, SharePoint data isn't bound to specific users; it's accessible by various users within the organization. Yet, they mandate a license for each user connected to SharePoint, irrespective of their level of utilization. This complexity raises concerns, particularly concerning the backup of SharePoint libraries. For example, if ten users access a SharePoint library, they assert that even if only one user is licensed, you must still procure licenses for all users to maintain compliance, even if they're not actively utilizing the service. Such a policy may pose compliance challenges, particularly when users intermittently access SharePoint data.

I have been working with it for six months now.

I would rate its stability as an eight out of ten.

I would rate its scalability capabilities eight out of ten. I believe that for medium-sized organizations, the solution should suffice unless there are specific reasons indicating otherwise. However, for larger cloud-based organizations, it's uncertain, especially if they are relatively new to the analytics box backup segment or lack experience in providing unlimited storage licenses. Additionally, larger organizations often have more stringent compliance requirements, which may not be fully met by the product.

The initial setup is straightforward.

You can configure the entire setup in approximately thirty minutes or less.

When purchasing licenses for the product, they operate on a user-based licensing model. If you have six users, you purchase licenses accordingly. I find the pricing structure satisfactory, it is around $25 per year. I would rate it seven out of ten.

When comparing to other vendors, based solely on my knowledge of their names as I haven't worked with them directly, I recall trying out the trial console of Barracuda, which seems somewhat similar. Barracuda was one of the pioneers in cloud-to-cloud solutions, whereas Acronis followed suit later on and wasn't initially a leader in this field. Acronis used to sell storage separately, which was considered a drawback, especially when you had to estimate how much storage your users would require. However, they have since introduced unlimited agent licensing, which addressed this issue. Another major player in backup, Veeam, initially followed a similar approach of providing your storage or purchasing it separately from cloud providers like Azure or AWS. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

We use this solution to backup some core, critical systems in our primary data center.

The most valuable feature is its consistency. It is an established product.

I feel like this product a little bit locked in the past.

This is not a feature-rich solution.

I would like to see a more SaaS-based solution, perhaps more cloud-centric. Essentially, keeping in lock-step with the other companies out there doing platform (PaaS) or software (SaaS) as a service, solutions.

We would like a more cutting edge, cloud-based DR solution that uses, for example, compression algorithms to make sure that backups run faster.

It is a stable product.

I have never had scalability problems with it.

I have not directly spoken with technical support.

We leverage all of our operations through what used to be Dell Services but is now known as NTT Data.

Our licensing fees are on a yearly basis.

We did an evaluation of many different solutions, primarily because we were moving from more on-premise to cloud-based solutions. So, as a result of going to the cloud, we looked at the Best of Breed in the cloud space.

Ultimately, we implemented two solutions. We use a Veeam cloud backup appliance solution and a leveraged TSM environment for our core operations provider. It was decided based on cost flexibility and technology richness.

Because this solution is not feature-rich, we have looked at other solutions.

My advice for somebody who wants to implement this solution is to make sure that they understand the requirements. This includes the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and the RPO (Recovery Point Objective). Based on the requirements, find the solution that is going to fit best for what they really want to invest in.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We use the solution for its backup and granular object restore features.

The solution helps us quickly backup clients' data in Office 365 following the move to the cloud from on-prem.

The solution's most valuable feature is cloud backup. Using it, we don't have to go through every mailbox, SharePoint site, or OneDrive account to configure the backup, you can almost just fire at your tenancy and forget.

The solution's reporting feature could be better. There are many false negatives and retriable errors.

We have been using the solution for around eight months.

It is a very stable solution, but we face challenges extracting reports. I rate its stability as an eight.

We have around 90 users in our organization whose Office 365 data is being backed up via Acronis. It is a very scalable solution but depends upon the business requirement. I rate its scalability as a nine.

We previously used on-prem Exchange and used Veeam to back up the on-premises server, we have since moved to hybrid exchange with the mailboxes in the cloud.

We worked on the solution's demo software initially to understand the process. It took us a week to complete it. I rate the process as an eight.

We took help from a third-party vendor for a part of the solution's implementation. Later, we installed the rest of it ourselves. It requires one or two administrators for deployment and maintenance.

It is a low-cost solution. But, its storage cost is high and varies at times. I rate its pricing a two or three.

I advise others to get a demo of the solution in the first instance. Also, they should take timely updates on storage costs. Apart from this, it is easy to use. I rate it as an eight.

The solution is a premium backup solution. It can back up disks, tape, and clouds.

The user interface is very good.

They have storage node software. It's safer and better for data deduplication and network traffic. 

It offers the best pricing.

So far, the support I've received is very good. 

The setup is very easy.

I don't have any notes about missing features.

We would always support better pricing. 

I've used the solution for ten years. 

I'd rate stability ten out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. The performance is good. 

I'd rate scalability ten out of ten. It easily extends. 

We are resellers with a couple of customers. 

Technical support is excellent. They are fast, responsive, and knowledgeable. We are very satisfied with the level of service. 

I've also used Veeam Backup. It's very similar to Acronis. Veeam does have a separate console for its backup.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes two hours. 

You have an installation file that includes everything you need. You can do a backup within two hours. 

The cloud is integrated into the same console as the local backup. 

We only need one person to manage the setup process. 

We can set up the solution ourselves for our clients. 

The solution does provide a good ROI. 

The pricing is excellent. It's one of the best-priced on the market. I'd rate the solution ten out of ten in terms of affordability.

Users do need to pay a licensing fee. There are no extra fees for the solution. That said, you can buy various subscriptions depending on what you need. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. I'd recommend the solution to others. 

We use it for the backups.

The advantages to me are I make two backups. I make a backup of the entire server that goes offsite. That's for disaster recovery. And then I make another copy of just two virtual servers that write on the physical server to a local NAS device. That way, I can do file-level restores.

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I have used it in the past. Not the same software, but the same company, and had success with it, and it was fairly easy to use. This one is much more complicated, but there are a lot more things involved in a backup. I have had issues with this one just in completing backups. Sometimes, for some reason, it has to run several times in order for it to do it completely, so I put in a ticket. We worked through it and it just seemed to solve itself, and neither one of us, neither the technician nor I, knew what it was doing or why it did, it but it fixed itself.

I also think the fact that it is extremely customizable means that it's really easy to get something wrong, and it not work as intended. So I would say, if there was a wizard that would lead you down a road, when creating a backup, that would probably be better than having to go online or call somebody to actually do a backup. It's not intuitive whenever you're trying to do something. You don't know whether you need to make a plan first or whether you need to make a backup first, it really depends on what you're trying to do and you really can't do that without asking somebody a question.

The problem that I've had would be more along the lines of it connecting to something else to back it up. For example, I'm currently having a problem with the way, when you have to select a network, I can't select a network location. I have to map a drive on the server, and then I have to select the mapped drive in order for it to put the backup out there.

I can't say this location is where it needs to go. I actually have to map a drive instead of going, "Just go to this IP address, this shared location, and put it here," I can't do that. It won't take it. I have to actually map a drive and put it in there for it to go, "Okay." If for some reason there's something wrong with that map, then the backup can't go there, even though I can ping the location, I can pull up the location, the software doesn't do that. 

Or, if it does do that, I don't know how to get it to do that, which I would say would be my complaint with it, the fact that there's not a lot of intuitive ways to be able to do something. In other words, it expects you to have the knowledge of how to operate it in order to set it up. If it's giving you a yes or no question and you don't know what this means, whatever that question is - "Do you want to do this, yes or no?" - if you don't know what "this" means or what "this" does, then I don't know how to answer that question

The problem is I can't select Help and it says, "Okay, if you're doing this, this is what you need to do. Or, this is for this, so if you want this, select yes. If you want this, select no." There's none of that. There's just me saying, "I don't know what this means." So, then I have to google it, try to figure it out.

If there was a wizard that would say, 

- "What are you trying to do?" 

- "I want to do a backup like this." 

- "Is it going to be offsite, online, another server?" 

It would create the configuration by asking questions through the wizard. This is what Microsoft has been doing for decades. That's how their stuff gets set up correctly. If Acronis had one of those - and it might, I just don't know how to get to it, or to start it - for it do the stuff for you, that would be a big thing for me.

No issues as far as it locking up or crashing, just actually getting it to do a backup, and do it correctly.

Any time that you do a backup that's not at the local level, it's online, you're at the mercy of whatever your connection is. If your connection is not good or stable, then you're going to have issues.

The issue is, when I did an offline backup - I don't know if it was my connection or because of how the software works or how it handles its packets - to upload the initial backup up took something like four days. That's a long time to me.

After the initial backup is done, when it does its daily backup offsite, it only takes about 20 minutes, 30 minutes. It's normal for it to take longer for the initial backup because you have to put all new information up there. After that you're just changing, it's a just a differential, so that's normal. When I'm doing the backup to the local, after the initial one, it takes about six minutes to do the backup.

The problem is that to get that initial thing done is painful. After that, the backup works okay.

I've talked to tech support several times. I would say they're a seven or eight out of 10.

This is going to sound bad, but this is the way it is in a lot of tech stuff. Whenever I call tech support and talk with somebody, and I can't understand them because of their accent, it's a problem. When I have support from a non native English speaker, it's very hard for me to understand stuff, and when they have to repeat things several times because I'm not sure what they're saying, to me that's a communication issue. If I'm calling the company, and I need support on their product, and I can't understand the person that I'm speaking with, then that's a communication issue that's not on me. That's on the company. 

It's not just Acronis that is like this, there are a lot of companies that are like this, and I understand why they do it. I'm just saying as an IT professional, it's very frustrating when you have to ask somebody to repeat things several times, or I repeat it and it's not correct, and they repeat it. And, we spend most of our time trying to figure out what each other is saying instead of fixing the problem. 

To me that's extremely frustrating.

We used the inherent Windows Server Backup in the operating system. And the reason we switched is, the way it's configured, for me to save to a location that's local, it has to take the entire location. In other words, I have to dedicate the entire NAS device to the backup, and it will reformat all of it and take all its space for the backup. 

I didn't want that. I have a NAS device that has other backup stuff on it that is not part of the server backup. It's archived information, so I couldn't do it that way. So for me to have a backup I would have to do the backups manually every day.

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You could use training for setup, but if they just made quick tutorial videos, for example, this is how you do a backup, a local backup, and have the video go through and do it. You would watch it. You would be looking at the same screen as you look at if you were doing it yourself. And then somebody would narrate. "This is what you do: you do this, you do this, you do this." Just walk through the steps. It doesn't have to be really detailed. Rather, when you get to an option where there's a question, and it's a yes or no question: "This is where you select this." Just a little video that's two minutes or three minutes long that shows you how to set up a backup. Something as simple as that.

A lot of people in the tech industry, or people who do this for living, they learn things quicker this way; in other words, show me once, I can do it. 

You don't need to have it for the lowest common denominator, make it kind of a medium level. Worse case scenario, they just rewind and watch it again. To me, if they did that then you'd have little videos where you see how to do things, how you use the app. Instead of it being written out, it's actually where I can visually see it. Some people learn better reading something, some people learn better doing something, some people learn better watching something, so give them different avenues.

Yes, we evaluated Norton, which I don't like. Acronis. And then, of course, the Microsoft solution.

I like Acronis as a company and the backup solution. Like I said, I've used it before, and it was very easy to use. It was a different backup solution than the one I'm currently using, but still made by Acronis. 

The same thing with Norton, I've had experiences with Norton, and it's a pain. There is always a problem, I have had configuration issues and restore issues using Norton. I don't know if it was that particular situation where it was a problem, but I've use Norton a couple of times and it's always been problematic. Every time I've used Acronis in the past - I've been doing this for 25 years - I haven't had any problems. So my experience in the past taught me to steer away from certain things. I don't use anything that has that word "Norton" on it. Seriously, whether it's antivirus, backup, it doesn't matter. Every time I've ever use any of their products it's always been a pain to get it configured and for it to work properly.

I would say it's not a steep learning curve, but there's a learning curve, learning how you want it set up, because of the amount of options that you're given. It's good that you have a lot of different options. It's also bad that you have a lot of different options, because it is really easy for you to be able to make a selection that's not going to optimize your backup solution. So, I would say that as long as you know what you need, and you're familiar with the software, then you should not have many problems, with a little bit of learning/reading about the app before you use it.

I would say Acronis is about nine out of 10, overall. Some documentation or some wizards that would help you through the process, especially if you're new to the software, would benefit. I'm never going to give anybody a 10, so nine would be a 10, because everything can be improved. I don't believe in a 10.