Whether you are an enterprise business owner or a freelancer, data is a critical element of your business. Unfortunately, unforeseen natural disasters, theft, and cyber attacks make the data vulnerable.
Loss of data through a malware threat, ransomware attack, hardware damage, or even theft, puts your business at stake. That’s why all businesses should put measures in place to back up data and restore it in case of a breach, disaster, or cyberattack.
Tools like Acronis and Macrium make data backup and recovery a breeze. They also offer protection against device failure, virus assaults, and mishaps that might threaten the security of your information.
But which of the two tools is suitable for your business or personal needs? It’s difficult to answer such a question without first putting each software under a lens to understand its features, how it works, its cost, and other parameters.
That’s the purpose of this guide: to discuss Acronis vs Macrium and help you make a decision regarding which app to use for your data security backup and recovery needs.
Ready? Let’s get started.
What is Acronis?
Acronis is an all-in-one cyber protection application for individuals, service providers, and businesses. It allows service providers to protect their customers from modern threats. Specifically, Acronis offers backup, cyber security, disaster recovery, and endpoint management to service providers.
On the other hand, businesses enjoy cybersecurity, data protection, and backup to ensure continuity no matter the situation. And individuals benefit from personalized cyber protection in the form of anti-malware protection and backup.
Active disk cloning, flexible backups, ransomware protection, recovery, and restoration are included with Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office. Acronis has many other features, but these depend on the subscription plan.
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How Does It Work?
The software can create complete disk backup archives for various file systems, including Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.
Acronis supports two distinct types of backup archives:
- File backups include user-specified files and folders, but not the disk or partition’s information.
- Full system images are made up of files, folders, and disk information.
When backing up a non-supported file system, Acronis reverts to sector-by-sector copy. It comes with an agent that may be installed in the operating system, allowing backups to be done in the background while the machine is in use.
Back-Up your Data Locally
Acronis may create backups of a computer, chosen drives, or data to a user-specified local location. Backups may be performed in three modes: full, differential, and incremental.
Full generates a single backup archive and backs up anything the user specifies. Differential backups contain just the changes since the last full backup. In contrast, incremental backups contain only the changes from the last incremental backup.
Because incremental backups are linked, the loss of any one of them renders the entire backup unusable.
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Backing up to the Cloud (subscription users only)
Users may choose to have their backup archives stored in Acronis’ data centers worldwide.
Instead of purchasing a copy of the program, users who pay for a year get cloud storage that they can use to keep cloud-based backups.
Restoring and Recovering
Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office enables users to recover contents from a complete drive or a file-based archive using pre-installed Acronis media or directly through the program’s user interface.
When protected system files are recovered, for example, when a whole system is restored to a previous state, the system restarts to complete the recovery procedure.
Additionally, users may install a backup archive, enabling them to examine the archive’s contents similarly to how they would browse any other hard drive.
Cloning
The program may clone one physical storage device (for example, an SSD or a hard disk drive) to another.
You should not format the drive before you clone data to it. Besides, it may be smaller than the source disk, but the disk must have at least the same amount of space as the data being cloned.
Lastly, it’s important to note that cloning is intended to retain disk metadata.
Reversing Modifications
Acronis enables users to safeguard chosen disk drives against unintentional modifications and revert them if an unexpected change occurs.
You may use that in place of virtual machines to build reliable and secure settings that you can restore rapidly from within the software.
What is Macrium?
Macrium is a software application that makes backup creation, management, and restoration easy. Besides, the company has solutions for ransomware protection and data recovery.
The founder had personally faced a data calamity and was unable to locate simple-to-use backup software at the time.
That incident resulted in the development of Macrium Reflect, which is well-known for its fast recovery rates and secure and safe disk image functionality today. Macrium has grown to satisfy customers’ disk imaging and recovery requirements by including new functionalities.
The program is available in five versions, one of which is a free version that has been available since the product’s inception.
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How Does It Work?
You may restore whole partitions or single files and folders to a single compressed attachable archive file using Macrium.
Users may use the software to produce an image of the hard drive partitions for quick hard disk upgrading or system recovery.
Imaging of Disks
You may build an exact and dependable image of a hard drive or disk partitions. You can also recover the entire drive, a partition, or specific files and folders using this image in the case of total system failure.
Furthermore, you may produce full, differential, and incremental images to improve backup performance and disk space needs. You may save those images to local or network devices, CD or DVD media, including USB, Firewire (IEEE1394), or eSATA external drives.
Backup of Files and Folders
Choose the files you wish to backup and use screening variables to include and exclude them.
Macrium utilizes the Microsoft Volume Shadow (VSS) Copy Service to backup open and encrypted files. You may create a backup of your folder and store it as an XML file for future re-runs and scheduling.
To improve backup performance and disk space needs, you may generate complete, differential, and incremental backups.
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Cloning
Cloning your hard disk drive results in creating a bootable new hard disk that contains the condition of your laptop at the moment of the clone.
It’s possible to clone an entire hard disk or individual partitions of a hard drive. This cloning is advantageous if you are updating your hard drive. After cloning, Macrium allows you to boot the destination drive on the same machine.
You can clone to your computer’s internal hard disk or an external hard drive in a USB hard-drive caddy.
Prevention of Attacks
The Macrium Image Guardian program prevents ransomware from encrypting backup files, allowing easy data recovery. Any unwanted changes, such as ransomware encryption are almost impossible by restricting write access to Macrium-specific file types.
Scheduling backups
Macrium offers daily, weekly, and monthly restore cycles, allowing you to choose the days and times of your backups. Scheduled backups occur regardless of who is signed onto the machine.
Support for VBScript and MS-DOS Batch Files
Macrium saves backup definitions in XML files accessible using VBScript or MS-DOS batch files to enable advanced batch and schedule processing.
It contains a robust VBScript generator that generates Windows Scripting Host (WScript) VBScript files that enable you to control your backup cycles programmatically.
Redeploy
You may start Macrium ReDeploy from the rescue environment to adapt the recovered Windows system to its new environment, whether a virtual machine or a separate PC.
Recovery Media
Users can use the Macrium recovery media to get a computer running again if the Windows operating system is completely lost. Users can do this on a CD, DVD, or USB stick.
The recovery disk launches a small operating system called Windows Preinstallation Environment, which has a familiar mouse and graphical interface (PE).
You can then get back partitions, whole disk images, or file systems with a few mouse clicks.
Features
Macrium
Macrium offers a range of site backup tools to track and evaluate your business’s online activity.
Here are a few of the numerous features Macrium’s products provide.
- Backup Content Browser
- Windows OS Live Image Creator
- Backup Encryption
- Server-Class OS Backup & Restore
- Backup Files and Folders
- Ransomware Protection
- Backup Set Consolidation
- SQL Granular Backup
- Backups Instant Boot in VM
- Incremental Backups
- Backups Schedule
- Bare Metal Restore
- Differential Images
- Central Management
- Site Manager
- Direct Disk Cloning
Below are some of Macrium’s business solutions:
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Workstation
It is an all-in-one backup workstation solution designed for business use. Advanced disk imaging technology safeguards papers, data, and operating systems.
Macrium viBoot is included for quick Hyper-V virtualization and Macrium Image Guardian for ransomware protection.
Server
Macrium Reflect Server Edition has a comprehensive collection of upgraded capabilities. This robust server establishes a new benchmark for image-based server backup systems. The server also provides the quickest time to first backup and the highest confidence when performing complete image or file and folder level restorations.
Server Plus
Macrium Reflect Server Plus is a feature-rich and sophisticated backup solution for servers running mission-critical programs such as Microsoft Exchange email and SQL databases.
Server Plus enables IT pros to set up and run backups. You can expect it to safeguard your mission-critical systems and facilitate a swift and trouble-free recovery.
Lastly, the software offers a Home Edition of their data backup solution optimized for home use.
Acronis
Here are some of Acronis features
- Full image backups
- All-in-one recovery drive
- Active disk cloning
- File and folder backups
- Incremental and differential backups
- Backup cleanup utility
- Quick backup validation
- Anti-ransomware and crypto-jacking protection
- Real-time protection
- On-demand antivirus scan
However, businesses and individuals may select from add-ons and programs that give them total flexibility over backup configurations.
Acronis offers the following data backup and restore solutions:
- Acronis True Image
- Acronis Disk Director
- Acronis Revive
- Acronis VSS Doctor
These software solutions may produce a mirror image of a computer’s operating system or a single partition, allowing rapid data recovery.
Additionally, you may back up specific files and directories if you’re not interested in cloning the complete system.
Verdict
Since Macrium is only used on PCs and does not support cloud storage, it is a far less appealing alternative than Acronis, which supports backup and recovery of data on various types of devices.
File Synchronization & Backup
Acronis
Even though Acronis’ installer is fairly huge (over 500MB), the installation procedure will take a few minutes.
When that is complete, you can begin configuring your backup options, deciding whether to mirror the whole hard disk or simply the most critical data on your computer.
The program allows you to choose whether to back up data locally or on the Cloud, but remember, you cannot pick both options simultaneously.
Plus, Acronis allows you to schedule backups and define the time interval between two backups.
The amount of information being backed up determines the backup duration. However, Acronis can execute cloud backups 13 times faster than its competitors.
Acronis is compatible with mobile, Macs, and PCs, allowing you to install the program on different platforms and sync the data easily.
Macrium
Macrium, on the other hand, is only compatible with various versions of the Windows operating system and cannot be used to sync data from devices running macOS, iOS, or Android.
Both Acronis and Macrium have a bare-metal restoration option, but Macrium does not support cloud storage.
Scheduling backups is slightly easier with Macrium because it comes pre-configured with various backup plan templates.
Macrium’s super-fast imaging, rapid delta cloning, and rapid delta restoring technologies significantly reduce the time required to clone or restore files.
Also, you may mount images created by this data recovery program in Windows Explorer to have rapid access to the files you wish to restore.
Verdict
When it comes to protecting data from hardware failure or security breaches, Acronis’ solutions provide more and better options than Macrium for both individuals and businesses.
Security and Privacy
Acronis
Acronis includes Active Protection, which employs heuristic rules to scan your files for unusual activities. This function detects and successfully recovers any ransomware attacks to encrypt your data.
The software maker uses end-to-end encryption to ensure that no one can access your backup data.
Likewise, you can create an encrypted file, but remember, recovery can be difficult if you forget or lose it.
Macrium
Macrium includes the Macrium Image Guardian security architecture, which prevents illegal file change attempts.
Unlike Acronis’ Active Protection technology, which monitors both backed-up and unbacked-up data, (MIG) solely blocks modifications to files that have been backed up before.
Macrium obtains, stores, collects, uses, and transmits the following sorts of personal data: identity data, technical data, marketing, and communications data, and other forms of personal data.
Macrium’s ability to safeguard your data from ransomware assaults is restricted to files already backed on a USB or local hard disk. Additionally, Macrium’s software products have access to and usage of your data for various functions.
Verdict
Acronis’ backup data software packages effectively defend against all ransomware assaults, making them a superior alternative to Macrium.
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Interface Design
Acronis
Acronis software solutions include intuitive, modern designs that make it simple to backup, archive, and sync your information.
The toolbar located at the right of the software’s main window contains all of the most important choices you can get by clicking on the item you wish to use.
Macrium
While Macrium’s New interface may allure PC users who want a vintage design, the software packages offered by Macrium look outdated and flat.
Unfortunately, Macrium may be simple for experienced IT experts only since its archaic UI might be daunting for those unfamiliar with data backup.
Nonetheless, all menus and choices are structured predictably. You should have little difficulty mirroring your operating system or backing up individual files.
Verdict
Acronis’ data backup programs are a superior solution for all Windows and Mac users since they include simple user interfaces that make all operations straightforward.
Acronis vs Macrium – Pricing
Macrium
Several personal and commercial membership packages are available for people interested in exploring Macrium Reflect 8’s capabilities.
The number of computers you wish to backup determines the cost of Macrium’s data backup software. However, the devices protected are not restricted to business packages.
On the other hand, the application’s personal-use editions are limited to four devices.
Macrium Reflect 7 is available for free download for personal use. Macrium is offered as a 30-day free trial, or you may buy a lifetime subscription for a one-time payment of $69.95. Furthermore, a package of four licenses is available for $139.95.
Subscriptions for businesses begin at $75.00 for a Workstation license. Server ($299) and Server Plus ($599) licenses provide additional sophisticated capabilities to assist you in protecting Windows servers.
IT firms may profit from a Technicians License ($799), which allows for managing an infinite number of devices. Instead, you may buy a Deployment Kit ($3250) that includes five technician licenses.
You can also access standard or premium support at an additional fee that varies by license type. It’s critical to remember that an annual subscription is required to use these services.
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Acronis
Apart from the one-time payment option, if you choose to copy and restore your data with Acronis, you may choose the yearly subscription plan.
The program’s cost is determined by the number of computers included in your license. However, remember that you cannot use Acronis’ personal products on more than five devices.
You may contact Acronis to obtain a quote if you want to acquire a license to restore and manage a wide range of devices or servers.
Acronis is available in three annual subscription plans. The Essentials plan costs $49.99, the Advanced plan costs $89.99, and the Premium plan costs $124.99.
Verdict
While Macrium and Acronis both provide comparable products, Acronis is somewhat cheaper.
The actual cost of a given license grows as the number of devices added increases. It is critical to determine the exact number of Mac or PC systems you wish to back up before selecting one of the available subscription packages.
Customer Support
Acronis
Acronis provides support for its products in various ways. Each product has a set of instructions and documentation areas, discussion forums, and tutorial videos.
You must be signed in to your Acronis account and have a registered product to receive direct technical help.
A variety of international phone numbers are available for sales queries, but you must be signed in to access them.
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Macrium
Macrium provides both free and paid assistance. Each purchase includes a one-year subscription to standard support, covering email ticketing and remote assistance.
Premium help is available for an additional fee (the amount changes according to your license), and it includes live chat and phone support.
Besides, there is a good information base and a community forum. You’ll discover various self-help tools in the knowledge base, including detailed documentation and several how-to tutorials.
Verdict
Both platforms have a well-structured support system that assists users when they try to navigate through the site. That is a tie.
Macrium vs Acronis – Similarities & Differences
Similarities
- Both software companies give away free trials of their software products.
- A bare-metal restoration option is available on both Acronis and Macrium.
- Both have robust support departments that help users with any difficulties.
- Acronis and Macrium offer the users a local backup option.
- Both platforms come with a monthly subscription model.
Differences
The key distinctions between Macrium and Acronis are as follows:
- Macrium is limited to cloning partitions on personal computers. Still, Acronis can clone and backup data on a variety of devices.
- Macrium requires a single purchase, whereas Acronis accepts recurring payments.
- Macrium does not have a cloud backup option, unlike Acronis that offers cloud backup.
- Macrium has a range of backup schedule templates, whereas Acronis doesn’t.
- While Macrium encrypts only the data, Acronis encrypts both the data and the storage.
Macrium vs Acronis – Pros & Cons
Macrium
Pros
- It is equipped with super-fast Imaging technology.
- The Rapid Delta Cloning design enhances the cloning performance.
- It provides users with the ability to mount photos in Windows Explorer.
- PIt provides an extensive library of pre-designed backup plan templates.
Cons
- It has limited OS compatibility; it only works with a certain version of Windows OS.
- There are no cloud backup alternatives.
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Acronis
Pros
- Office 365 accounts are backed up directly to the cloud.
- Simple selection of files, folders, or whole systems to backup
- All backups occur in the background without interfering with the operation of the computer.
- The Change-Block Tracker technique accelerates backup updates.
Cons
- Acronis is not cheap when it comes to backing up many devices.
- There are no templates for backup schedules.
Conclusion
Finally, we recommend Acronis over Macrium. Their services are essential for businesses and individuals who use Mac, PCs, smartphones, and tablets. Acronis will protect all of your devices.
It also offers a user-friendly interface that allows newcomers to navigate and back up their data. Moreover, it’s quick at storing data.
Lastly, this software is more realistic because you can keep your data in the cloud.
