Acronis True Image 2019 uses the Blockchain technology to provide top-level security for your backed-up files. This technology gives you the guarantee that your files have not been modified by fraudulent software, and when it is time to recover, you recover data from exactly the same file that was backed up.
What is Blockchain?
Blockchain is a database that contains information about transactions and their sequence. In general, a transaction represents an event, such as a financial operation or an operation with different kinds of assets. The transactions are united in blocks, which are written to the database one by one and form a block chain. Every transaction and every block has its own unique identification number. What is very important is that every block stores information about all previous blocks of the chain. Once written to the database, the information about a transaction cannot be changed in any way or by anyone, and the transaction sequence cannot be modified either. Any attempt to change any piece of information in the database can be easily identified by any user of the database, because there would be no information about the false transaction or false block in all subsequent blocks. This technology guarantees that data stored in the database is valid, belongs to a specific person, and has not been modified by anyone. See more information about Blockchain at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain_(database).
How Acronis True Image 2019 uses the Blockchain technology
To protect your files from unauthorized modification, Acronis True Image 2019 uses the Acronis Notary technology. This is a universal solution for timestamping and fingerprinting any data objects and streams. Since it is impractical to store large amount of data in a Blockchain database, Acronis True Image 2019 sends only file hash codes to the Acronis Notary service.
A hash code is a unique number of fixed size that is produced by a hash function. The code mathematically defines an arbitrary set of data, for example, a backup file. Any change of the backup file leads to a change of its hash code. Therefore, to check if the file was changed, you only need to compare the hash codes generated in the initial and current states of the file. If the codes match, this is a guarantee that the file has not been modified by anyone.
When Acronis Notary receives hash codes of your files, it calculates a new single hash code and sends it to the Ethereum Blockchain-based database. See more information about Ethereum at https://www.ethereum.org/.
Once the hash code is in the database, the files that were used to calculate this hash code are notarized by Acronis Notary. You can easily verify the file authenticity at any time by using the procedure described in Verifying file authenticity. Every notarized file has a notarization certificate, which is documentary proof that the file is protected with the Blockchain technology. A certificate contains general information about the file and technical details that allow you to manually verify the file authenticity. Refer to Manual verification of a file's authenticity for details.