Acronis True Image 2017 NG - Manual (Page 10)

10 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2017
2 Backup
In this section
Basic concepts .......................................................................................... 10
What you can and cannot back up ........................................................... 11
Backing up to local or network storage ................................................... 12
Backing up to Acronis Cloud .................................................................... 13
Notarized backup ..................................................................................... 14
Backing up mobile devices ....................................................................... 17
Scheduling ................................................................................................ 19
Backup encryption ................................................................................... 20
Backup retention rules ............................................................................. 21
Excluding items from backups ................................................................. 21
Network settings for backup .................................................................... 23
What is Acronis Cloud? ............................................................................ 24
Parallels Desktop support ........................................................................ 26
Backup list icons ....................................................................................... 27
Sorting backups in the list ........................................................................ 28
2.1 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 (p. 31) 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 (p. 12) and Backing up to Acronis Cloud (p. 13) for details.

To recover specific files and folders (p. 33) 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