Yes, it is included with Advanced and Premium licenses. Users of Essentials license get a free 30-day trial to evaluate antivirus and other Advanced Anti-malware protection features.

Yes, the anti-ransomware feature and protection against illicit mining of crypto currencies is included and enabled by default for all types of Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office subscriptions, including Essentials.

Users of Essentials subscription also get a free 30-day trial of integrated advanced anti-malware capabilities.

Yes, you get both backup and antivirus in one product.

Yes. Users of Essentials versions can start a free 30-days trial of advanced anti-malware features (real-time antivirus, on-demand scan and web site filtering) before upgrading to Advanced or Premium version.
Note: if you already have an active Advanced or Premium subscription on a different computer, then activation of 30-days trial of anti-malware features is not available on Essentials versions under the same Acronis account.

Advanced anti-malware protection features are available both in Windows and Mac versions of Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office. See table below for details:

Advanced and Premium subscriptions have real-time and on-demand antivirus protection. Owners of Essentials licenses are offered a free 30-days trial of antivirus protection and can upgrade to Advanced or Premium under "Account" tab in the program interface.

Yes, we are proud to share independent tests results: Results of the AV-TEST Private Windows Test. Acronis solution has demonstrated one of the best detection rates on the market. You also get the synergy effect by having the combination of disk imaging, data backup, security and cyber protection tools in one solution.

Yes. Acronis will not activate its real-time anti-malware protection feature, if Windows Security Center reports that another antivirus is currently active. That ensures that we will not initiate any conflict between two simultaneously running antivirus solutions. To eliminate possibility of that conflict from the other antivirus part, we recommend that you leave only Acronis product and uninstall the third-party antivirus.

Web filtering can be used independently of installed third-party anti-malware solutions. 

It is how Microsoft Defender was designed: it turns itself off automatically, if a second antivirus is installed.

If you want to pause anti-malware protection or deactivate it entirely, go to Protection section and click Turn off protection, then select for how long the protection should be deactivated:

Note that when protection is deactivated, related Acronis processes and services will still be active, however they will use minimal resources. This is expected behavior.

You can also switch off different components of advanced anti-malware protection: on Protection screen, click Settings.

On Settings screen, you can configure various parameters of anti-malware protection; to disable Anti-ransomware protection, Real-time protection or Web filtering, toggle the appropriate switch to Off: 

Most likely, you have a third-party anti-malware solution on your machine. In this case Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office deactivates real-time protection to avoid conflicts.

Only the first protection update can take time (>600 MB). All the subsequent protection updates will download only small chunks of data (varying from several KBs to a few MBs); their download should not take much time.

If computer with Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office is connected to Internet, antivirus signatures are updated every 5 minutes.

It is not possible to exclude a file located on a network share from Active Protection. Adding to exclusions is supported only for local NTFS volumes.

 There are many possible reasons, an investigation is required to determine the cause.

Some possible causes include: 

• A human factor, when an application that should have not been trusted, was allowed execution or added to the white list in settings
• Lack of proper patches of the operating system