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Acronis Online Backup Review

www.acronis.com

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Pros

• Integrates nicely with other Acronis products
• Use one account on multiple computers
• Restores are prepared quickly and begin almost instantly

Read the full review...

 

Cons

• Free trial is very limiting
• Cannot store more than 250GB
• No Mac version

 

Complete Review

Acronis Online Backup is the stand-alone online backup solution from Acronis, the company who brought you Acronis True Image for local backups and Acronis Internet Security Suite for avoiding spyware, viruses and spam.

Overview

With Acronis Online Backup, you can backup 250GB from 5 PCs for only $4.95 / month. Acronis Online Backup only supports Windows-based systems, however, so if you're looking for a Mac online backup service, look elsewhere.

Acronis claims, "Only Acronis offers you the combination of an online service, Acronis Online Backup and a local backup, Acronis True Image Home 2010." While IDrive offers a similar combination with IDrive Online Backup and IDrive Portable, Acronis True Image Home saves a full image of your drive, including the "operating system, applications, settings and personal files" while Acronis Online Backup saves your documents to the cloud. If you use a single provider for both online and local backups, or two different systems, backing up both to an external drive and a remote location is recommended.

Free Trial

Most online backup services offer a free trial. Mozy and IDrive give you 2GB to use, free for life. While Backblaze gives you unlimited backups, but for only 15 days. Acronis Online Backup limits both the amount of data you can store (2GB) and the time you can use it (30 days).

Installation

After creating your account, then downloading and installing the software, the installer just goes away. For many users, this is going to be a big problem, if they assume their computer will start backing up. Unlike other online backup services, Acronis Online Backup does not default to backing up regularly, and the default backup vault is set to only your "Documents" folder. So, if your hard drive fails, anything you have saved on your Desktop will not be backed up by default. Be sure to check this!

So, after you install Acronis Online Backup, be sure to launch the program to select the folders to backup and schedule the backup process to run at least once daily. After you've set the schedule, you can force the backup to immediately start.

Backing up

Acronis says, "Unlike some online backup players, Acronis never throttles bandwidth & upload speed after certain capacity points." During our test backup, we were seeing about 2.3 Mb / sec, which is .3 MB / sec. Not exactly the fastest upload speeds we've seen, but it could be because I was uploading multiple small files, versus a few large ones.

Managing the Backup

Acronis Online Backup integrates itself into Windows Explorer, meaning you can right-click to add or remove a file or folder to the backup set. However, if a file or folder is already in the backup set, you cannot right-click to restore it.

Restoring a File

You can restore a file two different ways: either from the web interface, or from the Acronis Online Backup application.

From the web, if you select multiple files, they are zipped up and downloaded rather quickly. No waiting around for the server to find and package up the files for you.

If you choose to restore via the Windows application, you check the files you want to restore and then choose the download location. Within a few seconds, the download starts and shortly thereafter, you have your restored files.

Other Features

Well, there are none. There's no sharing, no collaboration, no online photo albums - just online backup.

Conclusion

If you're already an Acronis True Image user, adding Acronis Online Backup is a no-brainer. The two services work hand-and-hand, and you'll be adding an additional layer of protection to your data.

Or, if you have more than one computer to backup, but less than 250GB total, Acronis is a good solution. For just $4.95 / month, you can backup up to 250GB over 5 PCs.

However, if you have more than 250GB of data, look elsewhere.