Acronis True Image (formerly Cyber Protect Home Office) offers a comprehensive suite of backup and security tools. This review explores its features, performance, pricing, and overall value, examining whether its comprehensive approach justifies its system footprint and subscription model.
A Deep Dive into Acronis True Image’s Features
Acronis True Image goes beyond basic backup functionality, offering a wide range of features designed to protect your data. Let’s break down the key components:
Backup and Recovery: A Comprehensive Approach
True Image supports various backup types: full, incremental, and differential. It can back up entire drives/partitions, selected files/folders, mobile devices, and even remote network locations. Advanced features include Blockchain notarization (premium version), automatic backup culling, splitting, sector-by-sector copying, validation, and pre/post-operation commands. Essentially, it covers every backup scenario imaginable.
True Image offers just about every backup feature known.
True Image supports a wide range of backup destinations, including local drives, network locations, Acronis Cloud storage (with select subscriptions), and even optical media. A bootable recovery disk creation feature further enhances disaster recovery capabilities, providing a system report facility for troubleshooting.
True Image offers a variety of pre-cooked backup schemes including the hybrid chain. The explanatory image is actually animated. Sweet.
Synchronization: Keeping Your Data Consistent
While distinct from backup, True Image also offers two-way synchronization between your PC, Acronis Cloud, and mobile devices. This allows for real-time data mirroring, ensuring consistency across multiple platforms.
True Image will sync as well as back up. This is file-based, not imaging.
Screen captures of the Acronis Android app.
Additional Utilities: A Complete Toolkit
Beyond core backup and sync, True Image provides several helpful utilities, including WinRE recovery media creation, disk cloning, a recovery partition creator, a system cleanup tool, and a secure-erase utility.
True Image offers a number of image and backup related utilities.
Malware Protection: An Added Layer of Defense
True Image incorporates real-time anti-malware protection, safeguarding against ransomware, viruses, malicious websites, and code injection. Testing demonstrated its effectiveness in blocking threats, although this feature remains optional.
True Image’s Protection settings page.
True Image warning you of a dangerous web page.
Performance and System Impact: Fast Backups, Heavy Footprint
True Image delivers fast backup speeds across various destinations, including SSDs, NAS, optical media, and Acronis Cloud. However, the main interface can be slow to launch, and the program’s system footprint is substantial, consuming significant disk space and spawning multiple background processes.
12 processes running in the background is a lot, even for a program as comprehensive as True Image.
One thing that disturbed me a bit was spotting the Google analytics report sender running alongside True Image. While comprehensive, True Image is also singularly intrusive.
Pricing and Value: Comprehensive Protection, Subscription Required
True Image offers various subscription tiers, with pricing dependent on storage capacity and included features. While the integrated cloud storage is convenient, the subscription model and significant telemetry might deter some users.
Acronis True Image is available as standalone, or with storage.
Conclusion: A Powerful Tool for Demanding Users
Acronis True Image excels in providing comprehensive data protection and security features. Its versatility and performance make it a compelling option for users prioritizing robust backup and recovery capabilities. However, the subscription model, system resource usage, and extensive telemetry warrant consideration. Users with less demanding needs might find alternative solutions more suitable.
