At a Glance

Expert’s Rating

Pros

• Imaging, backup, and catastrophe restoration
• Actively protects towards viruses and ransomware
• Integrated cloud storage accessible

Cons

• Heavy set up footprint

Our Verdict

Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (beforehand Acronis True Image) is a complete backup and safety answer with no equal. If you need every little thing tied up in a neat bundle, that is it. But in case your wants are minor, that is overkill.

Price When Reviewed

$49.99

Best Prices Today:

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

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

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

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

What are Acronis Cyber Protect’s options?

There’s lots 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 discuss backup. The program creates picture recordsdata from drives or partitions, in addition to chosen recordsdata and folders. These may be full (every little thing), incremental (every little thing for the reason that final backup), or differential (every little thing for the reason that preliminary backup). 

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

Cyber Protect Home Office helps you to save backup jobs and schedule them, robotically (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 brief, nearly each possibility invented by the backup group has been carried out.

The program additionally backs as much as practically any sort of media or location: native drives, community locations, the 1TB of cloud storage offered 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 isn’t 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 individuals conflate sync with backup, and whereas they’ve similarities, they’re not the identical operation. Backups are supposed to be immutable, remaining accessible effectively into the long run so you’ll be able to retreat to older variations and information. Syncs evolve and usually mirror the present state of your information.

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

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

The cause I mentioned the distinction between sync and backup is as a result of Cyber Protect Home Office options sync jobs as a separate operate — correctly. This lets you synchronize information between your native PC, Acronis Cloud, and your cell units. Yes, as talked about, Cyber Protect Home Office presents Android and iOS purchasers as effectively. 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 unique 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 straightforward to make use of — when you’re accustomed to it. It’s not amazingly intuitive on the subject of group and operation, however a half hour kicking the tires and you need to be good to go. Assuming you’re aware of fundamental backup ideas.

How efficient is Acronis Cyber Protects malware safety?

Just a few years in the past Acronis acknowledged a gap available in the market because of a spate of ransomware assaults, and added ransomware safety to its flagship software program’s bag of methods.

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 might’ve been royally hosed.

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

To take a look at Cyber Protect Home Office’s anti-malware talents I ran the exams on the WICAR.ORG web site and surfed some identified unhealthy areas of the net. Cyber Protect Home Office caught every little thing. As efficient because it proved, real-time safety is optionally available and could also be turned off.

How a lot does Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office price?

Acronis thoughtfully gives 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 accessible here.

You’re principally paying $75 per 12 months for 1TB of storage with Cyber Protect Home Office, which is simply 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 comparable to CloudMounter and Mountain Duck. These will combine any variety of on-line storage providers, together with cheaper S3-compatible providers, into Windows Explorer as pseudo local drives. You can then use the $50 model of Cyber Protect Home Office (or another backup software program) to again as much as them and avoid wasting coin.

Note that there are Enterprise-level variations of Cyber Protect accessible as effectively.

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 would 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 relatively gradual to launch. No doubt due the big 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 seen little affect on system efficiency apart from this system boot time, and fashionable PCs comparable to my AMD Ryzen take a look at mattress ought to have the ability to deal with it, however for older legacy {hardware} it is perhaps 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 helpful. Bottom line: If you’re in search of a complete, set-it-and-forget-it data-safety answer, I do know of nothing higher, or comparable for that matter.  

Note: Our software program testing is essentially restricted because of time and gear constraints. We report any difficulty skilled traditionally or throughout testing for the article; nevertheless, you need to analysis person boards for info on points different customers might have skilled. This applies to all software program.