Compare this 2021 edition to the 2019 release and you’ll find that two years of progress equates to little more than some new system tray notifications and customisable battery settings. The £29 annual subscription option is even less enticing: it could be a decent deal if it yields a significant upgrade every year, but at this point there’s very little that needs adding.

The likes of Ashampoo Backup Pro 14 tick a lot of the same boxes for less than half the price, and those with more modest needs may well find everything they need in a free package. £34 is a lot to pay for a local-only backup suite. If you’re looking for a catch, it’s the price. Uniquely among its rivals, Acronis also lets you choose which locale you want your data to be stored in: the company’s US data centre is the default, but we switched this to Germany, and you can also choose sites in France, Japan, Singapore or Australia.

The password-protection option remains, meanwhile, with all encryption performed locally so your data is only ever transmitted and stored in protected form. Compression and scheme options are preconfigured for off-site backups – which makes perfect sense – and to make the most of your cloud storage allowance you can specify how many old versions of files to retain, and how long they should be kept before being purged. Acronis Cloud appears in the application just like any other target device, and while you can’t set a single job to back up to both local and remote destinations, it takes mere moments to clone a local backup job and point it to the cloud instead.ĭig into the settings and you’ll spot a few differences between local and cloud tasks. It’s also impressive how elegantly cloud support is integrated into the mix. Again, performance is a strength: while Acronis couldn’t keep up with IDrive’s speedy upload rate of 1.23MB/sec, it averaged a creditable 0.9MB/sec, securing the whole folder in under 40 minutes. If you want that, you can instead opt for an Advanced or Premium annual subscription, which respectively include 500GB and 1TB of storage on Acronis’ servers.

The one thing that’s not included in the basic package is cloud backup.

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