Acronis Backup 12.5 is a backup solution intended for small to medium business and enterprise environments.

Based on Acronis Hybrid Cloud Architecture, it allows you to protect all the data, whether it is located on-premises, in remote systems, in private and public clouds, or on mobile devices.

Watch this video for an overview of the product:

Acronis Backup 12.5 is released in two editions: Standard and Advanced.

Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced offers a number of advanced features and benefits in comparison with the Standard Edition, such as backup to tapes, roles and delegations, SAN storage snapshots, Acronis Notary, Acronis ASign and other.

For a full comparative table of the options, refer to this article.

Acronis Backup 12.5 contains a wide variety of new features, including:

• A new backup format that increases the backup speed and reduces the size of backups
• Dashboard - a customizable set of more than 20 widgets that are updated in real time
• A new section in the UI shows all backup plans and other plans
• Conversion to a virtual machine in a backup plan
• Schedule by events
• SFTP as a backup location
• Backup file name
• Startup Recovery Manager
• Backing up Microsoft Exchange Server mailboxes
• Mounting volumes in the read/write mode
• Proactive protection from ransomware by detecting suspicious processes

New features available in Advanced edition only:

• Customizable reports that can be sent or saved on a schedule
• Roles and group management: create units and assign administrators to them
• Acronis Notary: prove that a file is authentic and unchanged since it was backed up
• Acronis Storage Node with deduplication
• Support for tape devices
• Working with bootable media via the backup console
• Backing up Citrix XenServer, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM), and Oracle virtual machines

(!) Please note that these new features are available in on-premise deployments only. They will be propagated to cloud deployments in future releases.

For a complete list of what's new in this version, refer to this page.

Please refer to this article to find the full comparison of these products.

A free 30-days trial version can be downloaded here.

Please note that the trial version has some limitations compared to the full one. Check this article for detailed information.

You can purchase a needed license directly on Acronis website or find your preferred reseller on this page.

Refer to this article for questions related to licensing of Acronis Backup 12.5.

Contact our Sales department if you have any questions.

For a complete list of the new features, please refer to this page.

Note that at the moment the new features are available in on-premise deployments only. They will be propagated to cloud deployments in future releases.

Acronis Backup 12.5 offers a new backup format, in which each backup chain (a full or differential backup, and all incremental backups that depend on it) is saved to a single .tibx file. This format leverages the speed of the incremental backup method, while avoiding its main disadvantage–difficult deletion of outdated backups. The software marks the blocks used by outdated backups as "free" and writes new backups to these blocks. This results in extremely fast cleanup, with minimal resource consumption.

You have a possibility to choose between the new format (Version 12) designed for faster backup and recovery, and the legacy format (Version 11) preserved for backward compatibility and special cases. After the backup plan is applied, this option cannot be modified.

Refer to this page for detailed information.

Deduplication is available only in Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced.

You'll find more information on deduplication best practices here.

Support for tape devices is available only in Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced.

For more information about it refer to this page.

Yes, Acronis Backup 12.5 includes centralized and remote management of backups to facilitate protection of all the data that resides on-premises, in remote locations, in private or public clouds, and on mobile devices.

This feature is available in Standard as well as in Advanced edition.

Cloning feature is available under bootable media in on-premise deployment or using Command-Line Utility.

Refer to this page to find a complete list of supported operating systems.

To start using Acronis Backup, you need to add at least one license key to the management server. A license is automatically assigned to a machine when a backup plan is applied.

1. Click Settings > Licenses.
2. Click Add keys.
3. Enter the license keys.
4. Click Add.
5. To activate a subscription, you must be signed in. If you entered at least one subscription key, enter the email address and password of your Acronis account, and then click Sign in. If you entered only perpetual keys, skip this step.
6. Click Done.

Licenses can also be assigned manually. Manual operations with licenses are available only to organization administrators.

1. Click Settings > Licenses.
2. Select a perpetual license. The software displays the license keys that correspond to the selected license.
3. Select the key to assign.
4. Click Assign. The software displays the machines that the selected key can be assigned to.
5. Select the machine, and then click Done.

1. Click Settings > Licenses.
2. Select a subscription license. The software displays the machines that the selected license is already assigned to.
3. Click Assign. The software displays the machines that the selected license can be assigned to.
4. Select the machine, and then click Done.

Please refer to this page for detailed instructions.

1. Click Settings > Licenses.
2. Select a perpetual license. The software displays the license keys that correspond to the selected license. The machine that the key is assigned to is shown in the Assigned to column.
3. Select the license key to revoke.
4. Click Revoke.
5. Confirm your decision. The revoked key will remain in the license keys list. It can be assigned to another machine.

1. Click Settings > Licenses.
2. Select a subscription license. The software displays machines that the selected license is already assigned to.
3. Select the machine to revoke the license from.
4. Click Revoke license.
5. Confirm your decision.

Please refer to this page for more information.

To upgrade to Acronis Backup 12.5 Standard, refer to this page.

To upgrade to Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced, refer to this article.

No, unlike Acronis Backup for VMware 9, Acronis Backup 12.5 requires installation of management server before appliance deployment.

Detailed instructions on how to deploy a virtual appliance can be found here.

Acronis Backup 12.5 supports two methods of deployment: on-premise and cloud. The main difference between them is the location of Acronis Backup Management Server.

On-premise deployment means that all of the product components are installed in your local network. This is the only deployment method available with a perpetual license. Also, you have to use this method if your machines are not connected to the Internet.

Cloud deployment means that the management server is located in one of the Acronis data centers. The benefit of this approach is that you do not need to maintain the management server in your local network.

(!) Please note that Cloud deployment is available only for subscription licenses and at the moment only includes features of the standard edition.

In both cases, to access the backup console, one should enter the login page address to the web browser address bar, and then specify the user name and password.

For on-premise deployment, the login page address is the IP address or name of the machine where the management server is installed. The Cloud console is accessible on https://backup.acronis.com/ (but not available for a perpetual license).

The following table summarizes differences between the on-premise and cloud deployments:

On-premise deployment

Cloud deployment

On-premise management server Unit and account management with the Advanced license only Both subscription and perpetual licenses can be used Agent for VMware (Virtual Appliance) and Agent for VMware (Windows) WAN optimization for replication of virtual machines (replica seeding) Bootable Media Builder Backup and disk management in bootable media Upgrade from previous versions of Acronis Backup, including Acronis Backup for VMware Participation in the Acronis Customer Experience Program Features introduced in version 12.5, which affects only on-premise deployments.

Unit and account management A subscription license is required No Agent for VMware (Virtual Appliance) Mobile backup to cloud

You can find more detailed information here.

Yes, ESX 6.5 is supported. A full list of supported operating systems and environments can be found here.

Agentless backup at a hypervisor level is not supported for Free ESXi because this product restricts access to Remote Command Line Interface (RCLI) to read-only mode, but backup of the virtuals machines with the agent installed inside the guest OS is possible. Refer to this article for more details. 

Windows user credentials are required to access the backup console.

A password is obligatory, if the user has no password, you need to set it in the system.

Refer to this page for more instructions.

For more detailed instructions, see this page.

Follow this video to install agent for Windows:

For more detailed instructions, see this page.

You'll find detailed information on customizing installation settings on this page. 

• Disks/volumes of physical and virtual machines
• Files (physical machines only)
• ESXi configuration
• System state (in cloud deployments only)
• SQL databases
• Exchange databases and mailboxes
• Office 365 mailboxes

For more information, refer to backup plan cheat sheet.

Acronis Backup lets you back up data to various physical storages:

• Cloud storage (Backups will be stored in the cloud data center)
• Local folders
• Network folder (shared via SMB/CIFS/DFS)
• NFS folder (available for machines running Linux or OS X)

• Secure Zone (available if it is present on each of the selected machines). For more information, refer to "About Secure Zone".

• SFTP

• Tape (only with Acronis Backup Advanced license)

Only SFTP server can be used as a backup location in Acronis Backup 12.5. 

Neither FTP, nor FTPS is supported.

Make sure that SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) is supported and activated on your server.

To select the SFTP server as a backup destination, type its name or address using the following notations:

sftp://<server>

sftp://<server>/<folder>

After entering the user name and password, you can browse the server folders.

Refer to this page for more detailed instructions.

A backup plan can be applied to multiple machines at the time of its creation, or later.

To create the first backup plan:

1. Select the machines that you want to back up.
2. Click Backup.
   

   The software displays a new backup plan template.

1. [Optional] To modify the backup plan name, click the default name.
2. [Optional] To modify the plan parameters, click the corresponding section of the backup plan panel.
3. [Optional] To modify the backup options, click the gear icon.
4. Click Create.

For detailed instructions, refer to this page.

1. Select the machines that you want to back up.
2. Click Backup. If a common backup plan is already applied to the selected machines, click Add backup plan. 

   

3. Select a backup plan to apply.
4. Click Apply.

For detailed instructions, refer to this page.

For a backup to Cloud, an active Cloud Storage subscription is required. 

Create a new backup plan(see section How to create a backup plan above) and choose "Cloud Storage" as a destination in the field "Where to back up".

Find more information on how to browse the cloud storage, view the contents of the backups, and download needed files here.

For detailed instructions, refer to this page.

Create a new backup plan and specify the desired location in the field "Where to back up".

For detailed instructions, refer to this page.

Secure Zone is a secure partition on a disk of the backed-up machine. This partition has to be created manually prior to configuring a backup. For information about how to create Secure Zone, its advantages and limitations, refer to this page.

Once a Secure Zone is created, create a new backup plan and specify Acronis Secure Zone as a destination in the field "Where to back up".

Yes, you will find detailed instructions in this article.

The backup plans can be transferred from Acronis Backup 11.7 during the direct upgrade to Acronis Backup 12.5. Refer to this article for detailed instructions.

If during the upgrade a backup plan did not migrate automatically, recreate the plan and point it to the old backup file. If only one machine is selected for backup, click Browse, and then select the required backup. If multiple machines are selected for backup, re-create the old backup file name.

The following schemes can be set:

• Always incremental (single-file)
• Always full
• Weekly full, Daily incremental
• GFS (Monthly full, Weekly differential, Daily incremental)
• Custom

The Tower of Hanoi scheme is not available in Acronis Backup 12.5. Please refer to this page for more information about scheduling options.

Refer to this page for detailed instructions on how to apply a new scheme to the existing plan.

You can choose one of the following options to specify how long to keep backups created by the backup plan:

• By backup age (default)
• By number of backups
• By total size of backups (not available with the Always incremental backup scheme, or when backing up to the cloud storage, an SFTP server, or a tape device)
• Keep backups indefinitely

Refer to this page for detailed instructions on how to apply the retention rules.

For additional protection of the application data, enable Application backup in the parameters of the backup plan:

Application-aware disk-level backup is available for physical machines and for ESXi virtual machines.

Please note that to be able to use application-aware backup, on a physical machine, Agent for SQL and/or Agent for Exchange must be installed, in addition to Agent for Windows. On a virtual machine, no agent installation is required; it is presumed that the machine is backed up by Agent for VMware (Windows).

Refer to this page for more information about application-aware backup.

For SQL Server: 

The account must be a member of the Backup Operators or Administrators group on the machine, and a member of the sysadmin role on each of the instances that you are going to back up.

For Exchange Server:

Exchange 2007: The account must be a member of the Exchange Organization Administrators role group.

Exchange 2010 and later: The account must be a member of the Organization Management role group.

For Active Directory:

The account must be a domain administrator.

Refer to this page for more information. 

Yes, the backup file name can be changed. Please refer to this page for detailed information on backup file name option.

For the moment, initial seeding is not available for Acronis Backup 12.5. To be able to use this option, you can downgrade your product to Acronis Backup 11.7.

Yes, databases are fully accessible during backup. Acronis Backup creates a snapshot of entire database (or entire disk with database, depending on the type of backup selected) and then records the contents of the snaphot inside the backup archive. Thus the database is available during the entire backup process, as all the data is copied during snapshot and Acronis Backup no longer requires access to the database.

To create bootable media in Windows or Linux:

1. Download the bootable media ISO file. To download the file, select a machine, and then click Recover > More ways to recover... > Download ISO image.
2. Do any of the following:

• Burn a CD/DVD using the ISO file.
• Create a bootable USB flash drive by using the ISO file and one of the free tools available online.
• Connect the ISO file as a CD/DVD drive to the virtual machine that you want to recover.

To create bootable media in OS X:

1. On a machine where Agent for Mac is installed, click Applications > Rescue Media Builder.
2. The software displays the connected removable media. Select the one that you want to make bootable.
3. Click Create.
4. Wait while the software creates the bootable media.

Please refer to this page for more detailed instructions.

If the operating system does not boot after recovery, use the Universal Restore tool to update the drivers and modules that are critical for the operating system startup.

Universal Restore is already included with Acronis Backup 12.5 and can be applicable to Windows and Linux OS.

To apply Universal Restore:

1. Boot the machine from the bootable media.
2. Click Apply Universal Restore.
3. If there are multiple operating systems on the machine, choose the one to apply Universal Restore to.
4. Configure the additional settings (for Windows only).
5. Click OK.

You'll find more detailed instructions here.

To recover disks by using bootable media:

1. Boot the target machine by using bootable media.
2. Click Manage this machine locally or click Rescue Bootable Media twice, depending on the media type you are using.
3. If a proxy server is enabled in your network, click Tools > Proxy server, and then specify the proxy server host name/IP address and port. Otherwise, skip this step.
4. On the welcome screen, click Recover.
5. Click Select data, and then click Browse.
6. Specify the backup location: select Cloud storage or browse to the folder under Local folders or Network folders. Click OK to confirm your selection.
7. Select the backup from which you want to recover the data. If prompted, type the password for the backup.
8. In Backup contents, select the disks that you want to recover. Click OK to confirm your selection.
9. Under Where to recover, the software automatically maps the selected disks to the target disks.
10. Click Recovery options to specify additional settings. (Optional)
11. Click OK to start the recovery.

For more detailed instructions, refer to this page.

To download files from the cloud storage, follow the detailed instructions on this page.

Yes, granular recovery can be performed to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and later. The source backup may contain databases of any supported Exchange version. For more information refer to this page.

Yes, physical-to-virtual migration is available in Acronis Backup 12.5. This operation can be performed if at least one Agent for VMware or Agent for Hyper-V is installed and registered.

To perform the P2V recovery, follow instructions on this page.

No, this option is not available in this version. You can downgrade to Acronis Backup 11.7 to be able to use it.