Acronis claims an RTO (recovery time objective) of as little as 15 seconds we tested this by recovering a Windows Server 2012 R2 system backup as a Hyper-V virtual machine. When it's time to restore files from your backups, the Instant Restore feature can very quickly convert a full system backup to a VMware or Hyper-V virtual machine for the easiest possible access. No agents are needed on VMs, and we found each of our Windows 10 VMs could be backed up to the NAS share in under three minutes.

After loading the agent on our host server, all VMs were immediately listed in the console. Backing up 25GB of test data to the LTO-7 tape drive also completed at a speedy average of 150MB/sec. When we backed up 120GB of data from a Windows Server 2012 R2 system to the NAS share over Gigabit Ethernet, the operation completed at an average of 204MB/sec - much faster than a direct file copy, thanks to Acronis' smart use of compression. We also configured an HPE Ultrium LTO-7 15000 SAS tape drive connected to a Windows Storage Node host, allowing it to be used as a shared backup location. To test regular backup functions, we set up a 27TB NAS appliance share as our destination, along with local storage on the management server. We tested this by encrypting a small group of files on a test host: the agent duly stopped the process and reverted all the files back to their original state in seconds. While backups may only run to a schedule, the new anti-ransomware feature keeps a constant eye out for dubious activity if it sees a rogue program meddling with your files, it can automatically kill the process and restore the files from the agent's service cache.

Backups default to 'always incremental', but you can change this to suit your needs traditionalists can also choose an old-school GFS ('grandfather, father, son') strategy. Your backup strategy is assembled in the form of 'plans', which bring together backup sources, applications, destinations, schedules, retention periods and encryption options.

Acronis backup 12.5 standard server