Acronis Cyber Protect
formerly Acronis Cyber Backup

To help organizations better understand the challenges of backup, disaster recovery and secure access, Acronis has created the "8 Noble Truths" of data protection. To view all 8 Noble Truths, please download the whitepaper. This is the fifth post in an eight-part series to help you protect your data:

Modern IT departments need a simple and secure backup method that takes the guesswork out of data protection and recovery. Single-pass image backup technology allows IT to generate a perfect copy image of a user's drive, or an entire system, to ensure all data is protected. That includes the operating system, applications, files, scripts, configuration data and custom settings. Those capabilities are especially valuable during the recovery process as the average cost of downtime per hour is more than $163,000, according to Aberdeen research. 

Disk Imaging: New Generation Protection

Traditional file-based backup methods, by contrast, require IT to reinstall the operating system, recover files and databases, and then manually implement all system configurations. 

“With image backup, IT managers don’t have to worry about whether they’ve backed up the right amount of data because it grabs everything,” says Joel Berman, Acronis fellow and longtime IT professional. “With other backup solutions, people often try to speed up the process by eliminating history files or temporary files, but these files can be important in the case of a system backup. Image backup is able to quickly restore all of them.”

Image backup provides disaster recovery and data protection in one package. No matter the threat — whether device failure, human error or even hidden threats like malware — image backup protects company data and ensures it is easily recoverable. 

“With image backup, an IT manager can identify when the virus entered and began corrupting the system, and he or she can then simply restore the clean, pre-virus version of the system from a backup,” says Berman.

Single-Pass Image Backup: 5 Benefits

Modern IT departments need new generation backup methods to protect all company data, on any device and in any location. The benefits of single-pass image backup include:

  • Simplicity: IT pros don’t have to make decisions about what to protect, or remember to include less obvious data such as customer scripts and application code, because image backup captures everything.
  • Migration: Enables “any-to-any” migration from the image backup. That includes virtual-to-virtual (V2V), virtual-to-physical (V2P), physical-to-virtual (P2V) and physical-to-physical (P2P) migrations, plus software and hardware conversions. 
  • Flexibility: “Bare metal” restore is possible for rebuilding the entire system from any recovery point. This saves time and alleviates stress during an emergency situation. 
  • Speed: All data is backed up in one fell swoop, including the operating system, applications, files and settings. Recovery is also faster because the application database does not need to be recovered separately. 
  • Reliability: Single-pass image technology reduces the chances for mistakes and data loss compared with multi-pass backups, which add complexity without necessarily adding reliability. 

Image backup is intelligent and understand file systems, organization and customized settings to ensure recovery is fast and easy. These benefits are crucial to busy IT pros who juggle many responsibilities. Single-pass image backup takes the guesswork out of data protection, ensuring recovery is fast and easy during an emergency when speed matters most. 

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[Image via Can Stock Photo]

About Acronis

A Swiss company founded in Singapore in 2003, Acronis has 15 offices worldwide and employees in 50+ countries. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud is available in 26 languages in 150 countries and is used by over 20,000 service providers to protect over 750,000 businesses.