Initial Seeding is an extra service with which you can send your backup to Acronis via regular post and have it uploaded

Initial Seeding is an extra service that lets you save an initial full backup locally and then send it to Acronis on a hard disk drive.

You may want to use this service if transferring the backup data over the Internet takes too much time.

If you are not sure whether you need Initial Seeding, you can check the approximate data transfer table:

If you are not sure about your Internet connection speed, you can check it with speedtest.net.

Once the hard disk is received, Acronis uploads the backup to the online storage. After that, you can add incremental backups to this full backup, either manually or on a schedule.

(!) Since the online backup file is not a regular *.tib file, you cannot restore from it, unless it is uploaded to the online storage.

A process reverse to Initial Seeding is Large Scale Recovery (LSR). With LSR, you can get your backup(s) on a hard disk, and then restore from it without having the data transferred over the Internet. See Acronis Backup to Cloud: Large Scale Recovery.

Initial Seeding step-by-step

1. Make sure you have a license for Initial Seeding. See Acronis Backup to Cloud: Initial Seeding Licensing and Acronis Backup to Cloud: Purchasing Initial Seeding;
2. Decide what type of HDD you want to use. See Acronis Backup to Cloud Initial Seeding: Supported HDD Types;
3. Create an Initial Seeding backup. See Acronis Backup to Cloud: Creating Initial Seeding Backup;
4. Carefully package the HDD with the Initial Seeding backup. See Packaging Your HDD;
5. Check the shipping address on the Initial seeding/Recovery tab of your account management page by clicking Show data center address.
6. Send the HDD with the backup.

   You select the shipping priority for the hard drive with the backup.

   The Initial Seeding will start within the same or next business day when the package is received with an average transfer rate of 100 GB/hr.