Available if the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Agent for Windows (or for Linux) is installed.

Select this option to back up specific files and folders.

If you are not concerned about recovery of the operating system along with all the settings and applications, but plan to keep safe only certain data (the current project, for example), choose file backup. This will reduce the archive size, thus saving storage space.

Available if the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Agent for Windows (or for Linux) is installed.

Select this option to back up disks and/or volumes. To be able to back up disks or volumes, you must have Administrator or Backup operator privileges.

Backing up disks and volumes enables you to recover the entire system in case of severe data damage or hardware failure. The backup procedure is faster than copying files, and may significantly speed up the backup process when it comes to backing up large volumes of data.

Note for Linux users: We recommend that you unmount any volumes that contain non-journaling file systems—such as the ext2 file system—before backing them up. Otherwise, these volumes might contain corrupted files upon recovery; recovery of these volumes with resize might fail.

Available if Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Agent for Hyper-V (or for ESX/ESXi) is installed.

Select this option to back up one or more virtual machines residing on a virtualization server.

Backing up a virtual machine means backing up all the machine's disks plus the machine configuration. With this source type, you can back up multiple machines. This comes in handy when having small (in terms of virtual disks size) but numerous legacy servers such as those resulting from workload consolidation. A separate archive will be created for each machine.

Available if Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Agent for Hyper-V (or for ESX/ESXi) is installed.

Select this option to back up individual disks or volumes within a virtual machine residing on a virtualization server.

With this source type, you select the machine and then select the disks/volumes to back up. This comes in handy when the operating system and applications, such as a database server, run on a virtual disk, but the data, such as a database, is stored on a large capacity physical disk added to the same machine. You will be able to use different backup strategies for the virtual disk and the physical storage.