Basic concepts

Backup and recovery

Backup refers to making copies of data so that they can be used to recover the original data after a data loss event.

Backups are useful primarily for two purposes:

• To recover an operating system when it is corrupted or cannot start. This process is called disaster recovery. For information about protecting your Mac from a disaster, refer to Backing up to local or network storage and Backing up to Acronis Cloud for details.
• To recover specific files and folders after they have been accidentally deleted or corrupted.

Recovery methods:

• Full recovery can be performed to the original location or to a new one.

  When the original location is selected, the data in the location is completely overwritten with the data from the backup. In case of a new location, the data is just copied to the new location from the backup.

• Incremental recovery is performed only to the original location and only from a cloud backup. Before the recovery starts, the files in the original location are compared with the files in the backup by file attributes, such as file size and date of last modification. Those files that do not match are marked for recovery, the remaining files will be skipped during recovery. In that way, as opposed to the full recovery, Acronis True Image recovers only changed files. This method significantly reduces the recovery time and saves Internet traffic while recovering from Acronis Cloud.

Backup versions

A backup version is created during a backup operation. Each version represents a point in time to which the system or data can be restored. The first backup version contains all the data selected for backup. The second and subsequent versions contain only data changes that occurred since the previous backup version. All the backup versions are stored in a single backup file.

Backup file format

When you back up your Mac to a local storage or a network place, Acronis True Image 2021 saves backup data in the proprietary .tib or .tibx format, by using compression. The data from .tib or .tibx file backups can be recovered only through Acronis True Image 2021.

When you back up your Mac to Acronis Cloud, Acronis True Image 2021 saves your data "as is". You can recover the data in the product or via the Acronis Cloud web application on any Mac computer that has an Internet connection.

Schedule

For your backups to be really helpful, they must be as up-to-date as possible. Schedule your backups to run on a regular basis.

Backup retention rules

Every time you run a backup operation, manually or on a schedule, Acronis True Image 2021 creates a new backup version in the backup location. To delete obsolete backup versions automatically, you can set the backup retention rules. Refer to Cleaning up backups, backup versions, and replicas for details.