You still get the same high level of features with Advanced Server 10, but the deduplication option isn’t as slick as that offered free with the A-Listed ARCserve Backup 12.5 and indexing performance severely limits its appeal.I took your advice and purchased Acronis True Image to backup my computer's hard drive (using disk image backups).

We’ve always been impressed with the level of backup, restore and disaster recovery features offered by Acronis’ imaging software. Consequently, if your daily rate of change of data is high then Acronis’ deduplication definitely isn’t for you. This means you can’t run further backups to that archive or recover data or volumes from it when an indexing job is running. The biggest problem with these indexing tasks is that they lock the vault while they’re running. However, for the 44GB backup of the remote server, the subsequent indexing job took an unbelievable 17 hours for an average speed of 2.5GB/hour. This wasn’t an issue with our data- rate change test, as each incremental copied 1.8GB of new data and the corresponding indexing task took around five minutes. Unfortunately, we found it could be much slower. Acronis advised us that it does this to improve backup performance and that indexing should run at speeds of around 20GB/hour. Whenever a backup is directed to a deduplicating vault, an indexing task is fired up afterwards to populate the database with the hashes of new blocks. On completion the size of the vault and index database was 29.2GB, resulting in an initial deduplication ratio of 1.5:1 and a storage saving of about 33%. We also ran a full backup of a 44GB data volume on a remote Windows server. After a two-week simulation, we saw Acronis deliver a reasonable deduplication ratio of 3.4:1. Using a 4.5GB data set consisting of 600 files, we introduced controlled changes within a percentage of the files during a standard backup strategy consisting of daily incrementals and weekly full backups.Īfter the first full backup was completed, 2% of the data was modified in 40% of the files prior to each subsequent backup.

Acronis has no published claims about deduplication ratios, so we used our standard set of tests to find out what it could do.

Acronis backup and recovery