Acronis True Image for Mac - why and for whom?

Good afternoon, dear inhabitants of Habr! Today we proudly present our new product, Acronis True Image for Mac , an application that protects your Macs from data loss.

Actually, as the name implies, this is a product for the Mac platform. And at the moment the most frequent question that we encounter is why and for whom we have made this product.

Why and for whom did we make this product?

By releasing Acronis True Image for Windows, we have recently been increasingly confronted with requests for Mac support from our clients. It is understandable with the success of Apple over the past few years.


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Yes, in Mac OS X there is Time Machine, but if a person used Acronis True Image, then, of course, he wants to have the same solution under Mac OS X. That is, the first group of our clients are our existing clients with mixed environments .
The second group of clients are people who are not satisfied with how embedded Time Machine works. Let's dwell on this in more detail.

Time Machine Setup

Time Machine makes backup copies once an hour, and it is not so easy to change. Yes, for most people reading this post and using Mac OS X, this is not difficult, but a simple user will hardly cope with this quickly. So the ability to clearly plan backups is a plus.

Incremental copies of files

Time Machine does not do incremental backups very well. That is, they are there, but at the file level. If the file has changed, then it is all entirely and will be added to the backup. This is especially painful for virtual machines. In fact, using TM in this case is almost impossible. The place where you fold your copies gets clogged up very quickly.

Virtual Machine Support

When it comes to virtual machines, we support backing up a Parallels virtual machine. That is, even if you have a Parallels virtual machine running, a backup copy of your disk will also contain it, and in a consistent state. From this copy, you can restore the virtual machine without losing data and “boot”. Why only Parallels? Mostly because Parallels dominates the market.

Cloud Backup

Cloud Support. We can make backups to Cloud. Yes, the first copy will take time, it is better to put it at night, for example. But in the future everything will be much faster. Mac OS X users are, on average, more mobile than Windows users, and therefore we consider it very important to have access to our backup copies and, most importantly, continue to make these copies on the go.

Data compression

Time Machine does not compress data during backup. We squeeze.

SMB support

We can make backups on the SMB ball (AFP, of course, too). For a mixed Windows – Mac environment, this is also a noticeable plus.

As a result, in the current decision, we tried to focus on the most reliable data storage, taking into account the interests of the target users. Using Acronis True Image for Mac, you can quite effectively follow the rule of three copies in different places (one copy must be deleted). One copy is on your machine, the second is on a local USB drive or NAS, the third is in the Cloud.

Restrictions

To be completely honest, let's talk about the current limitations of our product. Since any commercial development is limited in time, we also had quite tight deadlines. Therefore, it was decided to make the minimum required set of functionality in order to enter the market and begin to receive feedback from users. Further, already focusing on the reviews, you can plan the next version of the product. So, what are our limitations. We in the current release do not support:

• bootcamp,
• Fusion Drives
• File Vault

In the next versions we will add support for these configurations, building priorities based on feedback from users.

A small lyrical digression on the topic "Why is a backup copy important?"

Probably, I’m supposed to convince everyone at work that it’s important to take care of backup issues. But it just so happened that I myself was deeply convinced of the need to do this. Unfortunately, it is in our culture that hope for chance is very powerful. In our society, there are no very good habits that could greatly simplify life and save a lot of time. Not to be unfounded, I will give a recent example from my life. Surely many of you filed tax returns for tax rebates on your mortgage. Previously, in order to do this, it was necessary to indicate the confirmed income for the period and how much interest was paid to the bank for the same period (usually a year). But, as I recently discovered, now it is necessary to indicate the amount of money paid on interest for the entire loan period, and not only for the last year. It would seem nonsense, but this is if you have preserved the documents that you have collected by submitting past declarations, well, or the declarations themselves. And I did not save them, because it was never necessary. Now, apparently, you can get the necessary numbers only by contacting the tax authority. And this is spent time and unnecessary care. So such things, backup - all the head.

PS
I suppose there are a lot of Mac OS X users concerned about the backup issue. If you are currently using Time Machine, we would be interested to read about your experience, what you are satisfied with and what you don’t. We will give the key to Acronis True Image for Mac to the authors of the three most detailed answers so that you have something to compare.