True Image?
And will these features make it into their 'home' True Image software?
In a well-timed release Acronis has announced its Backup 12.5 product with automated ransomware protection and data integrity checking via blockchain. Acronis Backup 12.5 comes in two editions – Standard and Advanced – with an easy in-place upgrade by changing licence keys. We might think of the Standard edition for smaller …
Exactly! The Acronis Trueimage 2010 GUI interface was really good and then they kept changing it to a more basic and less understandable interface. The latest release with the stupid Windows Metro style interface was one of the worst GUI's I have ever seen on an application. Also the recovery CD builder was a disaster also. It either hung on boot or the keyboard and mouse wasn't detected.
When I moved to Windows 10 I could no longer use the older releases so I was forced to move to Aomei Backupper instead which although had features I missed from Acronis but at least it did the job well!
With the new interface, and repeated crashes and failures without usable log files to diagnose, I dumped a £50 licence after just 2 months. Support ends 30 days after you pay for the licence, when they stop helping you. Not an enjoyable experience. Won't use that company again.
To call anything they produce "Enterprise" is plain daft - my 2c.
... but isn't backup a comparatively simple thing theese days. I mean there's rsync which allows you to make very simple backups, even with deduplication. Since the user permissions are stored with it, you could even offer it to the user on a read-only network share.
Depends what you are looking for from a backup. For myself, I would like to keep a fairly long backup history, but not actually store a duplicate of each identical backed up file at every single history point if it hasn't changed. So I want to be able to look at (and restore from) the full state as backed up at any given date, but without duplicating a full backup's worth of storage for every date.
That said, it's probably worth keeping two full copies of any file, just in case one gets damaged, but that should be transparent to me, I don't need to see that.
Speaking of damage, I want to regularly verify integrity to ensure that the backed up files have not been damaged. I also want to verify that none of the live files have been damaged, but that's harder to do. An alert for any file which is not identical to the backed up version, but whose modification timestamp has not changed, would suffice.
It is also important that the backed up files may not be modified once written, in case any ransomware attempts to encrypt them too.
The backup must run without interrupting usage; it must be able to back up files that are open. VSS is the usual solution here.
Backup software is hard.
Actually all of that can be done with ZFS easily. Things like making a "snapshot" of your filesystem get done in sub-seconds. That's not quite a backup, but something to save you from the occasional "oops".
BTW rsync's main features is to compare 2 files. So in case your local file, or the backup gets corrupt, it'll make another copy.
Obviously, you'd still want to store your old snapshots as full backups to some external medium like tape. At least in a professional environment.