CONS

• Some cutting-edge technology may be risky to use
• Disk-cloning feature didn’t work in our tests
• Performance issues with upload speed and mobile apps
• Poor phishing and middling malware blocking results

What’s Included and How to Cancel

All versions include disk-cleanup and system-cleaning utilities. An offer called Try&Decide lets you use your system as a protected sandbox, so you can visit sketchy websites or install software that you’re not sure you trust—and then, with a few clicks, either return your system to the way it was before or keep the software that you installed while using the feature. Read our warnings about that feature later in this review.

One annoyance we found with Acronis True Image Crack has to do with its pricing. One of the reviewers paid $49.99 for an Essentials subscription, and then tried to upgrade it to the $89.99 Advanced subscription. You might assume Acronis would charge only the $40 difference. Instead, it listed the charge as an additional $69.99 to upgrade. That effectively penalizes customers an extra $29.99 for not choosing the Advanced version the first time.

You can cancel your account from the web portal by opting out of the auto-renewal payments or by submitting a support ticket. If you need disaster recovery services, you’ll have to look at Acronis’ business-focused offering, Acronis Cyber Protect. Both IDrive and Backblaze offer disaster recovery options for consumers.

Acronis True Image Pricing

Comparatively, Acronis True Image Crack Home Office’s starting price is in the middle of the pack. Carbonite Safe and Backblaze offer unlimited backup storage for $60 and $83.99 per year, though both services limit licenses to a single computer at that price. IDrive is cheaper at $79.50 per year for 5TB of storage for an unlimited number of devices.

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Protection and Privacy

Acronis True Image Crack says that it uses end-to-end encryption (AES-256) to protect your files and that it is designed so that the company has zero knowledge about the content of your backups. Users can set up a local encryption key (non-recoverable if you forget it) that is never sent to Acronis for each backup set, as well. Acronis’ data centers are protected from a physical security standpoint (fences, biometric access checks, and video surveillance) and can continue operating in the event of a power loss for 48 hours.

Acronis’ privacy policy states that it collects personal information you provide (contact and payment information) and your usage data (server logs and device information). This data is used to maintain your account, contact you, and improve and tailor its services. Acronis says it shares this data with vendors and resellers and will give this information to law enforcement officials provided there is a legal basis. For reference, Acronis is based in Burlington, Massachusetts, in the US.

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Getting Started With Acronis

Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office is available on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, but not Linux-based devices.

Acronis’ installer is large, at over 800MB, and it takes several minutes to run through its process; the installed program takes up almost a full gigabyte of space. After the install, you need to sign into your Acronis account or create a new one.

Cyber Protect Home Office’s interface is straightforward, with seven flat tabs along the left rail, and large, clearly labeled buttons throughout for various tasks. It’s one of the most visually compelling of the services we’ve tested, despite all its extra features. The program did noticeably stutter in places during testing, however.

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Emergency Planning

We tested the disk-imaging and backup features, focusing both on the most common tasks and on complex operations that only advanced users will care about.

Basic tasks went blissfully smoothly. A spacious menu lets you choose the files, folders, partitions, or disks that you want to back up, as well as select a destination PC or NAS drive. The menu also lets you plug in an external USB drive and use it as a destination. Every step is clear, and backing out of any choice is easy until you finally click OK. Acronis does an impressive job performing all the tasks that most users will want, including a full disk image backup, which is the default option.

Emergency Boot Disk

Like other disk-imaging and backup apps, Acronis lets you create an emergency boot disk to use when you need to restore a system that won’t boot, or when you’re restoring your backups to a new hard drive.

We used Acronis’ app to make an image of a boot drive, and then used the Acronis emergency disk to boot up the system and restore the image to an empty disk drive. What made this operation tricky was that the boot drive was formatted as a GPT (GUID Partition Table) drive and the drive we were restoring to was formatted as a traditional MBR (Master Boot Record) drive.

We knew it would be tricky because in past testing with a different app, we had a bad experience trying to clone a boot partition from a GPT drive to an MBR drive. The cloned drive couldn’t boot to the Windows desktop because this kind of restore operation only works correctly if the backup software performs some cleanup operations during the restore. Acronis, however, performed those cleanup operations just fine. Shadow Protect Desktop also performed this task correctly in a test.

Acronis True Image Crack emergency disk isn’t easy to navigate, and the emergency disk that you can create from the Acronis app’s main menu can’t restore a system to new hardware that’s different from the original machine, such as a new-model motherboard. For restore operations that restore to different hardware from the original system, you need to download a separate utility called Acronis Universal Restore. It creates a special version of the emergency restore disk. If your system fails, however, and you haven’t created this universal restore disk, you may not be able to restore your system to the new machine that you will buy to replace the failed one. It would make more sense to include the universal-restore features in the standard emergency disk—which is what Shadow Protect Desktop does in its emergency boot disk.

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Beginner-Friendly, But Handle With Care

Cyber Protect Home Security’s main menu is refreshingly beginner-friendly and clear, with helpful labels leading you to submenus for each of the app’s many functions. It’s easy to set up a backup schedule, encrypt your backups, and decide how long to keep older backups.

Some of the submenus aren’t as clear as others. For example, the Clone Disk Wizard uses a different visual style from the main menu, with cramped, uninformative dialogs. And some items on the main menu lead only to menus inviting you to buy other products, like remote access tool Parallels Access, which has nothing to do with backing up.

Acronis’ app is an impressive product, packed with useful features like an Archive menu that lets you store backups of large or older files on a separate drive so that you can get more room on your disk.

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Conclusion

Some of Acronis True Image 28.0.0  Crack’ features seem to push the technological envelope in ways that make us worry about the risks of using them. You don’t have to take our word for it—just look at Acronis’ own troubleshooting and advice pages.

An alarming-looking page about the Try&Decide feature warns that there are hardware and software configurations that the feature won’t work with. What if you don’t know about these limits until it’s too late?

Even more worrying, the same page has a few items that tell you what to do when the Try&Decide feature fails to undo changes that you made to your system while you were using it and now urgently want to reverse. But the page doesn’t tell you how to undo those changes. It only tells you how to reproduce the issue if you encounter it. Why would you want to reproduce the issue that you’re trying to solve?

If you want to use the Try&Decide feature when testing potentially dangerous software or visiting sketchy websites, you would be well-advised to test the feature by making harmless changes and then undoing them to make sure that you can do so when you experiment with dangerous features. Our takeaway from Acronis’ troubleshooting page is that we don’t want to use that feature at all.