Creating Acronis bootable media

Acronis bootable media is a removable drive containing boot files. When your Mac does not start, you use the drive to boot the Acronis recovery environment and recover your Mac from a previously created backup.

Fusion Drive and disks initialized with SoftRAID are not supported as targets for Acronis bootable media and Acronis Survival Kit.

If you do not have a backup yet, create it. See Backing up to local or network storage, Backing up to Acronis Cloud.

Using Acronis bootable media is the only way to recover your Mac from an Acronis True Image backup.

To create Acronis bootable media

  1. Connect a removable drive to your Mac.

    You can use a removable drive formatted with the APFS or Mac OS Extended file systems, having 4.3 GB (or more) of free space. For example, you can use an external hard drive or a USB flash drive. Note that CD and DVD media are not supported.

  2. Open Acronis True Image.
  3. In the File menu, click Create Acronis Bootable Media. In the opened window, click Create Media.

  4. The Acronis Media Builder window opens.

  5. Select the drive that you want to make bootable.

  6. Click Create Media.

    Acronis True Image creates a small partition on the selected drive and writes the boot files there. To create it, one of the existing volumes will be resized. If the disk is not a GPT one and it has a file system different from Mac OS Extended or APFS, Acronis True Image suggests formatting the disk. Pay attention, as disk formatting deletes all the data stored on the disk.

  7. When the process is completed, disconnect the media and keep it in a safe place. You can store your own data on the media, but make sure that you do not delete or modify the Acronis boot files.

We recommend that you create a new bootable media every time you upgrade your macOS to a newer version. Otherwise, your bootable media may not work properly.

If you boot a Mac with Apple silicon (with M1, M2, M3, or M4 chip) by using Acronis bootable media, the disks initialized with SoftRAID will not be available.