--- title: AnyData Engine description: The Acronis AnyData Engine is revolutionizing modern data protection. Fueled by over 50 patents, Acronis protects data in any environment with any device. canonical_url: https://www.acronis.com/en/technology/any-data/ locale: en last_updated: 2026-10-13 --- # AnyData Engine ## Revolutionizing modern data protection The Acronis AnyData Engine is the core suite of technology that powers all Acronis’ new generation data protection products to capture, store, recover, control, and access data in virtual, physical, cloud, and mobile environments. Its modular architecture lets you use one or more Acronis products, designed and optimized for a specific workload, and lets you add on, blend, and easily manage additional products as your technology infrastructure evolves — without replacing any products. Whether your data resides on-premises, in the cloud, or in remote offices, the AnyData Engine combines backup, bare metal restore, migration, deployment, system recovery, and access to keep your data safe. ![Image 2: Revolutionizing modern data protection](https://staticfiles.acronis.com/images/content/1880d112746593798f12d7793271a695.png) ### Active Restore Tracks operating system I/O requests and restores blocks when the OS needs them, continuing to restore other blocks in the background. This dramatically saves time and allows booting a machine and starting applications long before a restore is complete. ### Universal Restore Bare-metal restore enables recovering an entire server in minutes, either to the same or dissimilar hardware or virtual server. If the new hardware is different, Acronis injects the new drivers required to support the new hardware. ### Flexible Any-to-Any Migration The combination of unified backup format, Acronis Universal Restore, and incremental backup of live machines makes it very easy to migrate servers between any physical, virtual and cloud platforms and any locations, local or remote. ### Converting any system backups to any VM Disk format Effectively enabling zero-time VM recovery, you will just need to start the VM to recover your physical, virtual or cloud system. ### Compression and deduplication Saves time, space and network bandwidth for any backup. ### Encryption High-grade encryption (AES-256) is available as option to protect any data and any communication channel from unwanted attention. ## Acronis AnyData Engine benefits Fueled by over **100 patents**, the Acronis AnyData Engine is a set of deep and powerful New Generation Data Protection technologies that capture, store, recover, control and access data in virtual, physical, cloud and mobile environments. ![Image 3: Powers](https://staticfiles.acronis.com/images/content/a9158533e1d91f75e3cc6a2691be18fa.png) ### Powers Easy, complete and safe backup, disaster recovery and secure access solutions. ![Image 4: Delivers](https://staticfiles.acronis.com/images/content/ac5ead1f8b1709ab0d7b6db7e484a1a5.png) ### Delivers Best-in-class individual products optimized for your most important workloads that seamlessly blend into a total solution. ![Image 5: Protects](https://staticfiles.acronis.com/images/content/32b6592ac2824579bada00cb10df7ec8.png) ### Protects Any data, across any environment, in any location. ## Key Features ### Complete and Flexible New Generation Data Protection Defend more hypervisors, including RedHat, KVM, Oracle VM, Citrix Xen, VMware and Hyper-V, with simple licensing per host allowing protection for an unlimited of VMs. ### Full Disk and Virtual Machine Imaging Advanced snapshot-based image backup and recovery of physical and virtual machines. Patented snapshot technology speeds up backup and minimizes system overhead, so protected system does not have to be put off-line during backup. ### Unified Backup Format Data is stored to your choice of disk, tape or cloud using our patented Unified Backup Format optimized for speed, data compression, deduplication and flexibility. High efficiency algorithms reduce storage, IO and CPU requirement and enable unified, fast, easy and granular access to multiple versions of files, applications and systems across all workloads. ### Single-pass Block-level Data Management Eliminates the need for multiple agents for application, file and block-level data capture and dramatically increases speed and efficiency by preserving metadata in Universal Backup Format. ### Granular Recovery From a single-pass backup, granularly recover at the object, file, application or system level. ### Centralized Management Easy re-branding by changing a CSS style sheet. ### Hybrid Cloud and On-Premises Backup Full integration with vCloud Director using the VCD REST API to preserve all VM configuration settings. ### Room to Grow Per-tenant reports to allow flexible billing. ## Not a combination of separate products The Acronis AnyData Engine is a common framework that allows all Acronis products to seamlessly become one solution. Its modular architecture lets you use one or more Acronis products, designed and optimized for a specific workload, and lets you add on and blend additional products as your technology infrastructure evolves — without replacing any products. Use the same unified console to configure, install, and maintain each product, and if you have more than one Acronis product, use the Acronis RMM Server (AMS) - a single dashboard that lets you easily manage the backup and recovery of all data across multiple Acronis products. Whether your data resides on-premises, in the cloud, or in remote offices, the AnyData Engine combines backup, bare metal restore, migration, and system recovery of any virtual or physical server or PC in a Windows® or Linux® operating environment. ![Image 6: Not a combination of separate products](https://staticfiles.acronis.com/images/content/2ba9341915fb0c17e100a45960f5948e.png) ## How it works The Acronis AnyData Engine framework operates on three layers: unified control, critical workloads, and core capabilities. Unified control Acronis Active Protection constantly observes patterns in how data files are being changed on a system. One set of behaviors may be typical and expected. Another set of behaviors may signal a suspect process taking hostile action against files. The Acronis approach looks at these actions and compares them against malicious behavior patterns. This approach can be exceptionally powerful in identifying ransomware attacks, even from ransomware variants that are as-yet unreported. ![Image 7: Unified control](https://staticfiles.acronis.com/images/content/e2adec07c29bdb8f561791fddd474d26.png) Any workload Acronis Active Protection is capable of detecting new threats based on already identified patterns as well as learned ones. Results must be adjusted to reduce false positive detection of things that really aren’t ransomware. Acronis Active Protection maintains an allowlist — programs that are allowed and expected to perform certain actions — to prevent authorized activities from being falsely tagged as unauthorized. ![Image 8: Any workload](https://staticfiles.acronis.com/images/content/8220bc064452822361bf174e87aa6d32.png) Any data One way that criminals could choose to compromise files would be to attack the backup software itself to corrupt the backup files it creates. To protect against this, Acronis has implemented a robust self-defense mechanism that won’t let criminals disrupt the work of the Acronis application or backup file content. Additionally, Acronis Active Protection monitors the Master Boot Record of Windows-based computers. It won't let any illegitimate changes to be made to prevent you from being able to properly boot your computer. ![Image 9: Any data](https://staticfiles.acronis.com/images/content/a96672422cf5dd5e1ee67228aed97bd2.png) ## System requirements #### Any server * Physical * Virtual #### Any storage location * [Cloud](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/cloud-backup/) * [On-Premises](https://www.acronis.com/en/products/cyber-protect/) * [Remote Offices](https://www.acronis.com/en/products/cyber-protect/) #### Any application * [MS Exchange](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/application/) * [MS SQL Server](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/application/sql/) * [SharePoint](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/application/sharepoint/) * [Active Directory](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/application/) #### Any device * [Servers](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/physical/linux/) * [Workstations](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/endpoints/) * [Mobile](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/mobile/) #### Any protection * [Data backup](https://www.acronis.com/en/products/cyber-protect/) * [Secure access](https://www.acronis.com/en/products/files/) * [Bare metal restore](https://www.acronis.com/en/technology/universal-restore/) * [Migration](https://www.acronis.com/en/technology/universal-restore/) * [System deployment](https://www.acronis.com/en/products/snap-deploy/) #### Any migration * V2V / V2P / P2V / P2P #### Any file system * NTFS / ReFS / FAT16/32 / Ext2/3/4 ReiserFS3 / XFS / JFS #### Any virtual environment * [VMware](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/virtual/) * [Hyper-V](https://www.acronis.com/en/backup/hyperv/) * [XenServer](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/virtual/) * [RHEV / KVM](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/virtual/) * [Oracle VM](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/virtual/) #### Any OS environment * [Windows](https://www.acronis.com/en/backup/windows-server/) * [Linux](https://www.acronis.com/en/solutions/backup/physical/linux/) ## Related products * Acronis Cyber Platform Modernize your clients' security and backup with integrated cyber protection [Learn more](https://www.acronis.com/en/products/cloud/cyber-protect/) * Acronis Cyber Protect Complete cyber resilience for small business, including backup and DR, anti-malware and remote endpoint monitoring. [Learn more](https://www.acronis.com/en/products/cyber-protect/) * Acronis True Image Protect your digital life with the only personal cyber protection solution that integrates backup and anti-malware [Learn more](https://www.acronis.com/en/products/true-image/)