George Miller
Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office Review 2024 (Formerly Acronis True Image): Does It Worth A Penny?
If you are looking for a quick answer then “NO” and here is why. First of all this is not a “paid review” I just want to share my real negative experience with Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office so you will not make the same mistake. All Acronis negative feedbacks, ratings and trends can be easily checked by you.
I strongly recommend that you take a closer look at the best Acronis alternatives Paragon Hard Disk Manager, Novastor NovaBackup, AOMEI Backupper Pro, Easeus Todo Backup or others. I found Paragon Hard Disk Manager the best choice as it combines backup/recovery/clone with disk management solution in a single license. You can find exclusive Paragon Software coupons and discounts on our website here. Why I do not recommend Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office and advice Paragon Hard Disk Manager as the best backup/recovery solution? So there are several reasons you just can’t ignore and I consider it my duty to warn you about them.
- Secure cloud backup with double protection
- Non-stop backup
- Low users’ ratings and feedback
- May cause a system crash
- The overall declining popularity
- Slow backup/recovery speed
- Cloning issues
1. Acronis Has Lost Users’ Trust
Acronis loses their trust among users from year to year. As a confirmation you can find plenty negative real Acronis user’s reviews and ratings which can be easily found on many forums. You can check it yourself, just type “acronis review forum” or “acronis users ratings” in Google or similar keywords. And this is not just negative attitude, people face real problems after installing and using Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, they are telling about completely ruined PC/laptops when they try to perform a backup or disk clone. So it looks like Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office causes some software related issues with your system which lead to hardware and hard disks problems.
2. Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office Low Rating and Feedback
User feedback reveals if a program delivers on its promises and I visited various forums, social media sites and review sites to find out how real customers feel about Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office.
The first consumer review website I visited was Trustpilot where the program received an unimpressive TrustScore of 1.6 out of 5 from about 130 reviews (a bad mark), here is the link. You can check yourself that more than 80% of users set the “bad” mark! Users complained about buggy software and slow customer service. Few long-term users of Acronis complained about slow service and occasional software issues that have forced them to look elsewhere even after using Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office.
On TrustRadius, a similar review site, the scenario was completely different, with Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office scoring 7.8 out of 10 from 42 reviews. The backup and restore functions received praise from numerous users but the software bugs seemed to be a bone of contention for several users that Acronis needs to address immediately if they want to preserve their reputation. Some users also mentioned cloning issues.
The program’s rating on ResellerRatings was abysmal, to say the least and the company scored a mere 1 out of 10 from 53 reviews. The unreliable customer service and bad software experience were still the major drawbacks of the program as pointed out by users in other review sites as well.
The Acronis forum discuses several recurring issues with the Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office and offers helpful advice as well as technical support. While there are several issues on the forum, I decided to focus on the cloning issue which seemed to be the most relevant one according to numerous users on various consumer review sites. Here is the link to Acronis forum with the mentioned issue.
3. Poor Acronis Support
Even if you close your eyes to the above mentioned arguments, decide to buy Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office and run into real problems (you may of course not face the troubles if you are a lucky winner), you may not be able to solve them by contacting the support. Acronis support is based in India, again many negative reviews can be found on forums/reviews/blogs, twitter and facebook accounts. It looks like Acronis support drives people crazy as they are not tech savvy so they can’t solve technical issues. The level of English of Acronis support is very low, they can hardly understand you and you will hardly them because their pronunciation is very poor, the same goes for email and chat support.
4. Acronis Declining Popularity
Ever-declining Acronis popularity (as a company) can also be confirmed with Google Trends. You can also easily check it yourself. Google trends show the popularity of any search query among real users depending on their search activity. Here are the results of users search quires for the keywords “Acronis” and “Acronis Cyber Protect” for the past years.
As you can see there is a significant decline in “Acronis” as a company starting from 2016 and from year to year the users interest in Acronis software just go down. As for Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (formerly Acronis True Image) this is a brand new software (released 2021) but has very low user interest in search trend.
If you consider a good, reliable backup/recovery and disk clone software I really recommend you to check some alternatives. After reviewing a dozen of similar software I found that Paragon Hard Disk Manager will be a perfect one.
5. Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office Personal Experience
I have used Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office for a considerable period to be able to point out the issues that bother me. While I find the program to be feature-rich and quite efficient, there are several aspects where it needs improvement. The trial version of the software is a mammoth 600 MB in size and download as well as installation takes considerable time. The main program also boots slowly. The installer did not run smoothly and the “Install” sign was still displayed on my computer screen even as the installation process ran in the background. On clicking “Install” again, the installer froze and I had to restart the installation process.
The other complaints I have against Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office are unexpectedly buggy software and a UI that needs improvement. The program can’t be fully terminated and continues to run in the background even after I close the main program. The program remains active via a system tray icon and can’t be closed by any means. Furthermore, some Acronis features always run in the background even if you are not using them and deplete system resources. A less pertinent issue yet one that I could not ignore was the UI displaying some features, such as “Archive” and “Sync” among others, on the sidebar even though users of the standard version can’t access the features.
Though Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office is one of the fastest programs I have used to date, it is not the fastest by a long margin. The backup of my entire system partition of just over 200 GB took roughly an hour to complete but my system remained responsive during the entire time. Small and indistinct ‘+’ signs for expanding trees coupled with limited language support and organizational issues add to the inefficiency of the UI. Acronis doesn’t provide two-factor authentication, a salient security feature that every cloud-based program, especially backup programs that hold personal data, should provide to protect users from password thieves and hackers.
6. Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office In The News
Several users have faced backup settings issues with Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office that resulted in some of the backup settings being reset to the program’s default values. Acronis, in an official statement, blamed the issues on the cloud and informed customers of a problem in its data center. While the company assured customers that appropriate steps have been taken to address the issue and prevent its spread, you can find more information in this article.
Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite is one of the main competitors of Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office and it supports up to 3 devices with one license as compared to one device per license allowed by Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office. While both programs offer a similar set of features, they differ in terms of functionality and few extra advanced features that are available with one but not with the other. Paragon allowed me to adjust its equivalent setting while the Compression option in Acronis was disabled and stuck at “Normal”. The Hard Disk Manager Suite was also faster than Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office. A backup of a test drive of around 15 GB took just over 6 minutes with Acronis Cyber Protect, a tad slower than the 5 minutes taken by Paragon’s Suite.
However, Acronis Cyber Protect’s estimation of the time remaining till completion was far more accurate than the wildly fluctuating estimates displayed by Paragon. Both Paragon and Acronis offer an efficient notification feature but Acronis provides more notification options than Acronis. Notifications for backup actions, backup session completion, and even insufficient disk space can be emailed to the user. Some important features offered by Paragon but not Acronis include rescue disk creator, flexible restore and intelligent automaton. Though Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office offers flexible restore options, Paragon offered me greater control over the process. Paragon’s UI is also better designed than Acronis and is much easier to navigate.
The Hard Disk Manager Suite installed smoothly and without the issues that I faced with Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office. Paragon also offers a better after-sales experience with a more efficient customer support service than Acronis. Paragon provides support via email which Acronis lacks.
AOMEI Backupper Professional is a backup solution similar to Acronis but is much simpler than Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office. The AOMEI UI is not as cluttered with inessential as that of Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office and its software runs more smoothly compared to Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office’s buggy software that numerous users complained about on various review websites. The Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office program is prone to frequent freezing because of bugs that Acronis is yet to take care of. The frequent freezes make data inaccessible and display unhelpful error messages with no further instructions to solve the issues. On the other hand, Backupper Professional runs smoothly with no visible lags or software bugs.
AOMEI uses cloning systems for disaster recovery which is more efficient and reliable than what Acronis offers. Backupper is easier to set up than Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office and there are no glitches like the one I experienced with Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office. The software notification function is still one of the best in the market and it sends detailed logs in notifications by default. Acronis provides bare metal recovery, a feature that AOMEI lacks. While AOMEI is only compatible with Windows, Acronis works with Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS and web-based platforms. However, AOMEI supports at least three languages including English, Turkish and Dutch whereas Acronis supports only English.
Though AOMEI lacks certain advanced features offered by Acronis, I will choose the smooth functioning of AOMEI Backupper with limited features over the buggy functioning of Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office with numerous features that I may or may not need. AOMEI offers lower licensing costs compared to competitors and has better ratings from user reviews on consumer review sites than Acronis. The customer support offered by Acronis is average whereas AOMEI provides great technical support. Furthermore, Panasonic and Samsung are among the prominent clients that use AOMEI Backupper Professional.
The free Easeus Todo Backup version offers such features as backup, recovery, disks partitions, scheduling and disk cloning among others. It supports incremental as well as differential backups and can backup to a cloud.The free version even comes with 16 TB hard drive capacity. While Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office offers a free trial version, it does not offer the range of features that the free Easeus version offers. Easeus provides extensive language support including English, German, Japanese, French, Italian, Hindi, Chinese and Spanish among others. Acronis is compatible with all commonly available platforms and so is Easeus except for Linux.
Feature-wise, both the programs offer similar functions but Acronis offers a lot more features even with the Standard version, some which many users may not need at all. If countless features are not necessary to you then Todo Backup is a better choice as it sacrifices the number of features to offer a lighter UI and a cleaner experience. The Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office UI may look modern but does not run as smoothly as the Todo UI and I encountered glitches several times. The average UI performance of Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office can be blamed on the sheer number of features, some of which are honestly unnecessary, that it packs into the UI. Acronis bare metal recovery that Easeus lacks. On the other hand, Easeus allows system transfer to different PC and schedule backups based on events.
Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office is marketed as a backup solution for small and medium businesses whereas Todo Backup can also serve large companies well in addition to efficiently serving small and medium businesses. Easeus provides excellent customer service via email, phone, tickets and live support. Acronis does not offer email support and its customer support is not as highly rated by customers as that of Easeus. Microsoft, IBM, FedEx are some prominent Easeus clients.
NovaStor NovaBackup allows users to create images of data and the whole system, restore images and schedule backups. NovaStor’s Disaster Recovery feature is unique and offers better security than Acronis. Acronis offers a similar feature known as Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office with more customizability options such as full, incremental, differential methods, version control options, compression level, encryption and scheduling. While both Acronis and NovaStor can create backup in different destinations, each offers one destination that is not offered by the other. Unlike NovaBackup, Acronis is compatible with the newest OS version of Microsoft, Windows 10.
NovaBackup integrations such services as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, SkyDrive and SafeSync among others. Acronis features less integrated services and offers Office 365 backup with only the Advanced and Premium versions. The Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office software contains several bugs and suffers from performance issues that are not experienced with NovaBackup. Furthermore, NovaBackup’s UI was easier for me to use than Acronis’ feature-packed UI. NovaBackup also installed with less fuss than Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office and requires fewer system resources than Acronis.
A huge advantage of NovaBackup over Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office 2024 is it lets users save more via plenty of NovaStor coupons, discounts, and deals in addition to being cheaper than the latter. While Acronis does not offer email support, NovaStor provides complete customer service via email, phone, live support and tickets. The NovaStor customer support team also responds faster and receivedfewer customer complaints than Acronis on consumer review sites.
To add a positive note to this review I have added some useful Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office step-by-step instructions in case it can help you.
1. How to Create Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office Bootable CD/DVD or USB?
- Insert a CD/DVD into the optical drive or plug in a USB drive
- Launch the program
- In the main window, open Tools on the side bar and click Rescue Media Builder
- In the popup window, select Acronis Bootable Media option
- In the next window, select the disc in which you want to create the bootable media
- Click Proceed in the next step and Acronis will create bootable disc
2. How to Recover the System Using Acronis Bootable Media?
- Turn on the computer and insert the CD/DVD or connect USB drive in which the rescue media is to be created
- Enter the BIOS setup and arrange the rescue media drive as the first boot device in the boot order
- Boot the computer from the rescue media and choose Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office
- In the newly opened Acronis Cyber Protect window, click on Home and select My Discs option below Recover in the home screen
- Now select the backup to be used for recovery and if the backups are not displayed, you can manually specify the path to the backup
- Open the Recovery Method and select Recover whole discs and partitions
- Open What to recover option and select the system partition, it is usually designated as ‘C’
- Go to Settings of partition C, here you can check the settings and if the default settings are correct, click Next or you can make the changes before proceeding any further
- Click the Finish button and Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office will show you the summary of the Deleting partition and Recovering partition. The volume of the two partitions should be the same unless you resized it in the settings. Click Proceed to continue
- When the recovery process is finished, exit the setup and remove the rescue media. Now restore the original boot order and reboot the system. You can see that Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office has recovered your system as per your expectations
Things you should keep in mind
If you have created entire disk and partitions backup from your source HDD, including all those hidden partitions, restoring this to the new SSD drive and achieving the same result provided you did a clone, but it comes with the additional protection of having the backup which you can use should anything goes wrong.
Whether you are doing a restore or a clone, the bootable Rescue Media of Acronis ought to be booted using the same mode as you do with your Windows OS to boot. This means if the Windows uses the EFI bootloader (which means it has Secure Boot), you should be using the same for Acronis Rescue Media as well.
I used the Windows PE version of Acronis Rescue Media, and you should see the same or almost identical panels if you are using the Linux-based, standard rescue media. The only difference you are going to experience is that the standard or Linux media doesn’t come with an additional device support, which is the only difference.
Acronis Backup offers the users comprehensive and flexible options for taking backup on their Windows machines and restore entire systems and to restore files and folders as well. Whether you are running a small business or you are head of a rather big organization, follow the steps mentioned above to restore full system backup using bootable disc.
3. How to Backup Disks and Partitions to the Acronis Cloud?
- Launch Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office
- On the main window, click the Backup button on the sidebar
- Now click the plus sign at the bottom of the backup list to add a new backup
- Type a name for the backup so that you can easily identify it in the due course
- Click the backup source icon on the screen and now, select the Discs and partitions
- A new window opens showing all the discs and partitions in your system. You can select them by checking the boxes next to the discs or partitions you want to backup, and click OK
- Click the backup destination icon on the main window and select Acronis Cloud
- You need to sign in to your Acronis account in order to create a backup in the cloud, so sign in with your id and password. If you do not have an account, click the Create Account button and create a new account
- If you want to set the backup options such as scheduling, backup schemes or password protection, click Options button. You can also skip this step
- Now click Backup Now button to run the backup to Acronis Cloud
Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office is an efficient backup and recovery program but its proprietary backup format can be inconvenient in the long run. The UI looks attractive and modern despite being crammed with features. While most features are useful, some features are redundant on Windows 10 and feel like unnecessary padding. For example, the system cleaner feature works fine but not as good as the Windows built-in tools. The Acronis series of software improves with each new version and I am hoping the next version rectifies the bugs this one suffers from.
If you use Windows 7, select Start – Control Panel – Uninstall a program – Acronis True Image – Uninstall. Then follow the instructions on the screen. You may have to reboot your computer afterwards to complete the task.
Nice article comparing Acronis to the other version of software. I’ve been using Acronis for many years starting with version 8. I’ve ran into the freezing issue in version 2015 and 2017 but usually it was with the computer mouse not being detected. I normally use the Boot Disk and not within Windows. However, I’ve since started using AOMEI Pro and a free software suite called ‘Lazesoft’. Would be nice to see a comparison between AOMEI, Acronis and Lazesoft.
Unlike your article about Paragon the software does not clone. In fact when I inquired to them about cloning they replied back the Paragon does copy disks. I am sure you know that there is a vast difference between copying a disk and cloning a disk. Based on the reply that I received from paragon I quite sure they do not know the difference.
Hello Roger,
What license of Paragon you refer, Paragon Hard Disk Manager Advanced or Paragon Backup & Recovery? The first can do so called “Data Migration” or disk clone using Drive Copy Professional which is a part of Paragon Hard Disk Manager Advanced since 2020. Here is a step-by-step tutorial how to clone a disk from the company’s knowledge base https://kb.paragon-software.com/article/133
Paragon Backup & Recovery can do simple tasks like full system backup and restore but it doesn’t support “clone feature”.
So I assume that support team said “copy disks” but they meant “clone disks”. Even in their KB article it’s said “How To Copy Hard Disk?” but it’s actually about how to clone the disk as it makes the copied disk bootable. And yes I understand the difference between “copy” and “clone” but in terms of Paragon support these two words are synonyms.
Regards,
George
Your review was very thorough and very well written. The software is really terrible. Unfortunately, it worked okay for about 30 days, so when I started running into issues it was too late to get a refund. Since the software is poorly written, windows fails on the uninstall and I need to complete a current deadline before gambling on their cleanup utility to fix the mess. Right now I do not trust it to do damage to my system.
I’ve been using ATI since 2015 and was running ATI 2019 until I bought a Perpetual Lic ATI 2021. Big mistake. Installed fine on W10 and did backups like a dream. The only trouble was I could not restore from any .tibx or .tib file. In fact I couldn’t even get the restore module to load either from the app or rescue media. It would just hang the machine. My PC is up to date with W10 updates and uses all the latest device drivers. Maybe ATI 2021 got miffed because my PC still uses BIOS. My ATI 2019 boot disc worked just fine but could not see the .tibx files. What good is a program that has lots of feature but the important one – the restore function – doesn’t work. I’ve “upgraded” ATI 2021 to ATI 2019. I wasted my money on ATI 2021 but Acronis has lost me forever.
I can’t help but agree. I’ve had endless issues with Acronis True Image 2019 – it’s a complete pig of a program. Notifications of failed tasks, like validation of the backup, are non-existent – you have to manually remember to check or set up emails. Backups freeze for no reason requiring a reboot, other times the destination can’t be found even when it’s on the same physical disk as the program. It’s very hands-on just to keep it working and even then you’re never confident it actually is – it lulls you into a false sense of security, then when you try to restore something, you probably can’t.
Your review was very thorough and very well written. The software is really terrible. Unfortunately, it worked okay for about 30 days, so when I started running into issues it was too late to get a refund. Since the software is poorly written, windows fails on the uninstall and I need to complete a current deadline before gambling on their cleanup utility to fix the mess. Right now I do not trust it to do damage to my system.