Presales: trying to understand imaging
I'm doing a trial of True Image Cloud 2016. It seems like it does a Time Machine style backup, from which it could literally restore all your software, preferences intact, and all your data, if needed.
But does it also do imaging? I'm new to imaging, but my understanding is that it's all your software - operating system and programs you've installed - without your data. That way if, say, your operating system becomes corrupt or you get malware, you can just reinstall all the software. IIUC, the idea with imaging is to create an image every few weeks so that if you discover you've had malware lurking for a while, you can go back to an older image without losing your more recent data.
I can't find this function in the trial software, unless I'm misunderstanding, which is likely. I see an option to "Restore PC" or "Restore Files." I'm afraid to touch them, but I'm assuming "restore files" lets me restore all my files or just a few, as needed. And "Restore PC" means the whole Time Machine-like process where you restore EVERYTHING.
Is there no option to JUST restore the software as it was? I thought that's what Acronis was famous for. Do I need a separate product for that?
Thanks so much for replying, Steve. I'm looking at the guide, and some of it is just over my head. I guess what I thought of as "imaging" is more like a Windows System Restore Point.
But let me ask you this. Let's say I've got backups going back a couple of months, and one day I realize a ransomware has gotten through my many defenses, encrypted my files and deleted all shadow copies and restore points (which most of them do now). The best way to treat malware is to reformat your hard drive and start over fresh rather than try to clean the PC and hope for the best. The problem is: malware can lurk for a while before deploying, so your latest backup may not be free of malware.
So here's my question: if I "Recover PC" from my oldest backup on Acronis' cloud, just to be safe, could I then "Recover Files" from a newer backup so that less data is lost? It seems to me this should work - it should all be on the cloud, anyway. If so, this would IMO give Acronis a big boost compared to the cloud services that only backup data.
Jenn, the issue of protection from ransomware is a thorny one and which requires more than one backup approach.
Any data that you store on your computer system or on any connected disk drives is potentially at risk from this type of threat, this includes data stored in Cloud backup areas too or on networked drives.
This thus requires that you keep multiple different sets of backup data - for example, an initial system state backup that contains the system as you have it after you have installed all your programs and updated your OS, configured user accounts etc. This should be stored offline away from any threat of infection or encryption by malware.
Next, you need to create backups to secure network resources, i.e. NAS storage, where there are no user shares to the backup data, where the only access to that data is from a dedicated NAS user account that does not match any Windows account, and is used only by ATIH to access and write the backup data to the NAS. This means that any malware would be challenged to provide these dedicated NAS user credentials if attempting to access that backup data.
Alongside these more secure methods, you should also have other backup targets for key data that needs to be protected so that you never have all your 'eggs in one basket'.
Obviously, all of the above can be bypassed by weak security policies on your computer systems, i.e. defaulting to using Administrator accounts where any wrong click on an email link or website page can give malware free access to the system. Keeping systems updated with latest software and OS updates to protect against known weaknesses goes hand in hand with this.
I'm actually pretty savvy about preventing malware. BTW, NAS drives aren't safe anymore - a number of users are reporting those getting encrypted along with everything else. The malware writers keep getting better, which is why backup is crucial to any plan - you have to assume all your precautions may fail.
I have an initial state backup, as you described it, stored offline. But you can't store that kind of thing in the cloud, so if your local copies of it all get destroyed in a housefire, you're out of luck.
Getting back to my question, could you "Recover PC" to go back to a pre-malware state, and then "Recover Files" to get the data back to its latest clean state? If so, that would put Acronis miles ahead of the competition which just saves data. If not, then it's not worth the extra cost compared to Crashplan and others that would restore data but not help you restore the OS and software.
Getting back to my question, could you "Recover PC" to go back to a pre-malware state, and then "Recover Files" to get the data back to its latest clean state? If so, that would put Acronis miles ahead of the competition which just saves data. If not, then it's not worth the extra cost compared to Crashplan and others that would restore data but not help you restore the OS and software.
The answer is yes... with an anticipated 'but'...
Yes, you can recover your PC back to a previous, pre-malware state, assuming that you have backups that predate the malware infection, and that you can identify when that infection was first on the system.
Yes, you can also recover your files and folders back to any state for which you have a backup image of these, again assuming that you can know when any infection occurred and know that none of the contents of the backup were affected by that infection.
Thanks, I understand the caveats and that answers my question. Much appreciated - the support guy I chatted with didn't even understand what I was asking.