Acronis Launches ‘Backup Service’; Allows Backing-up Anywhere, Restoring Anywhere

Run a business and need “ultimate” data protection? If so, Acronis’ just-released ‘Backup Service’ could prove useful, as its feature set is immense. An overall summary would be “backup anywhere, restore anywhere”, and that includes not only raw data, but disk partitions, OS images, and so forth.

As a business solution that scales, pricing information isn’t provided at Acronis’ site, and I can’t speculate at what the costs would be. What I can say is that this is one of the coolest cloud services going in terms of feature set.

At the core, Acronis Backup Service aims to back up data to the cloud, but the intensity of what’s saved is up to you. Some might prefer to preserve space, for example, and not save entire disk images, whereas others might require it. And for business, it stands to reason that having such images is important; even if a PC hard drive dies, you could pop a new one in, and then take advantage of this service to stream the backup from the Web.

While Acronis’ home-targeted True Image doesn’t run on Linux, this backup service touts excellent support for it thanks to its headless nature. In particular, any Linux with a kernel ranging from 2.4.20 ~ 3.15. Not surprisingly, hypervisors are also supported, including solutions from VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft, and also Linux KVM.

Other perks of Acronis’ backup service includes the ability to restore data or a disk image to a different machine, and manage it through a Web UI. It also sports a complete set of security features: transfers are secured through SSL, and the data itself can be encrypted in AES-256.

To learn more about Acronis’ latest backup product, head here.