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Offline decryption

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Is it possible to store and restore backups from Acronis’ cloud without ever sending Acronis the passphrase? I ran a test where I uploaded an encrypted backup. When I tried to restore it, I had to provide the passphrase while I was online.

Backblaze is upfront with how their model works and that backups can’t be restored without sending the passphrase to them (see quote).

To decrypt your data, you are required to enter your passphrase on our secure website.  When you do so, it is passed over an encrypted connection to our datacenter where it is used to decrypt your private key, which in turn is used to decrypt your data.  Your passphrase is never saved on disk and it is discarded once it is used.

Does Acronis True Image work the same way or is there some way to decrypt the backups locally and offline?

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Karl,

Please see the ATI 2021 User Guide: Online backup protection - for the official statements from Acronis on this topic.

There is no offline method of decrypting your cloud backups, you need to provide your Acronis account credentials along with the encryption password you used when the backup was created before you can access that data for any purpose.  If you lose or forget your encryption password then it cannot be recovered full-stop!  Not by Acronis or anyone else (unless the user has used a trivial / guessable / insecure password for encryption and account, i.e. 'password' '12345' etc!).

Hi Steve.

Thank you so much for your quick reply.

If I understand correctly, it means that the encryption password has to be sent to Acronis’ servers to restore the data. Am I wrong? Do you know of any technical documentation where the decryption process is described in more detail?

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Karl, I don't believe that Acronis have published any specific documentation for the encryption / decryption process used for Cloud backups other than the statements given in the ATI user guides.

The main Acronis Product website describing the features of ATI 2021 has the following statement:

End-to-end encryption
Secure your backup using enterprise-grade AES-256 encryption that keeps your data private, whether it is on-site, in transit, or the cloud. Not even Acronis can read your encrypted files.

I have found one Acronis Article that you may find helpful:  Your data is secured: Acronis encryption capabilities

You would need to engage directly with Acronis to get any greater detail but I doubt this would be forthcoming or it would already be found in the Knowledge base repository documents!

I understand. I’ll reach out to Acronis and ask if they can shed some light on the situation. Thanks for your assistance.

Karl Emil Nikka wrote:

I understand. I’ll reach out to Acronis and ask if they can shed some light on the situation. Thanks for your assistance.

I realize it's an old thread, but I had the same question. Were you able to gain more insight from Acronis? 

Denis Loginov wrote:

I realize it's an old thread, but I had the same question. Were you able to gain more insight from Acronis? 

Unfortunately no. I also reached out to their Swedish PR service, but they couldn’t get an answer from Acronis either. So we just stopped using Acronis products.