When the worst happens,
be back online in hours, not weeks.

Recovery time depends on the type of incident and the size of your data. For file-level restores, individual documents or folders can typically be recovered within minutes. For full server or system restores from a local backup, we aim for a recovery time of 2–4 hours for most SMB environments. Cloud-only restores take longer depending on your internet connection speed. We document recovery time objectives for each client during setup so expectations are clear before an incident occurs.

For hybrid DR solutions, yes. A local backup appliance or NAS device stores your most recent backups on-site, allowing fast local recovery without relying on internet bandwidth. For cloud-only backup, no on-site hardware is required beyond your existing servers. We recommend hybrid for any business where data is business-critical, as the combination of local speed and off-site redundancy gives you the best of both options.

Yes. Acronis^® Cyber Protect includes active ransomware protection that detects and stops ransomware processes before they can encrypt your files, and can automatically roll back any changes already made. Immutable cloud storage means that even if ransomware reaches your backup agent, it cannot delete or encrypt your cloud backups. This is one of the most important differences between Acronis^® and legacy backup products.

Cloud backup starts from £150 per month and hybrid disaster recovery from £350 per month, both including Acronis^® Cyber Protect licences, monitoring, and our management service. Pricing scales with the volume of data protected and the number of devices. We provide a fixed-price proposal after an initial assessment of what you need to protect.

Backup is the process of copying your data to a secondary location so it can be restored if lost or corrupted. Disaster recovery goes further: it means having a plan and the infrastructure in place to restore not just your data but your entire business operation, including servers, applications, and services, within a defined timeframe. We provide both and design each solution around how quickly your business needs to be operational again after an incident.

Most SMB environments benefit from continuous or hourly backups for critical systems, with daily backups as a minimum for everything else. We configure backup schedules based on your recovery point objective (RPO), which is the maximum amount of data you can afford to lose. If losing a day's work would be acceptable, daily backups are sufficient. If losing more than an hour would cause serious problems, we schedule more frequent jobs.

The 3-2-1 rule is the industry standard for backup design: three copies of your data, on two different types of storage media, with one copy held off-site. Our hybrid DR solutions follow this principle by maintaining the primary data on your servers, a local backup copy on-site, and a third encrypted copy in the Acronis^® cloud. This protects against hardware failure, site-level incidents like fire or flood, and ransomware.

The first backup takes longer than subsequent ones because the entire data set must be copied. For a typical SMB with 500 GB to 2 TB of data, the initial cloud backup may take 24–72 hours depending on your upload speed. After the initial backup, Acronis^® uses incremental backups that only copy changed data, which are much faster and have minimal impact on your network performance.

Both. Acronis^® Cyber Protect supports granular restores at the file, folder, email, database record, or full system level. If a member of staff accidentally deletes a document, we can restore just that file in minutes. If a server fails completely, we can restore the entire system image to new hardware or a virtual machine. The level of granularity is one of the key advantages of Acronis^® over basic cloud storage or tape backup.

Backup jobs are scheduled to run during off-peak hours to minimise impact, and Acronis^® uses bandwidth throttling to limit the upload speed used for cloud backup so it doesn't compete with your business-critical traffic. After the initial backup, incremental jobs are small and have a negligible impact on network performance.

Data is encrypted at source before it leaves your network using AES-256 encryption, and remains encrypted throughout transit and at rest in the Acronis^® cloud. Only you hold the encryption key, so Acronis^® and our team cannot access your data. The Acronis^® cloud infrastructure is ISO 27001 certified and compliant with UK GDPR data residency requirements, with UK and EU data centres available.

Yes. Acronis^® Cyber Protect combines backup with active cyber protection in a single agent. It doesn't just copy your data: it actively monitors for ransomware, vulnerability exploits, and malicious processes in real time, and integrates threat intelligence to detect emerging attacks. Standard backup products simply copy data on a schedule and have no active protection component.

Acronis^® Cyber Protect supports Windows and Linux servers, desktops and laptops, virtual machines (VMware and Hyper-V), Microsoft 365 (including Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive), Google Workspace, and SQL databases. If your business has a mix of on-premises servers and cloud services, we can protect everything from a single management console.

Yes. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace include limited built-in retention but are not a substitute for proper backup. Data can be permanently deleted, accounts can be compromised, and administrative errors can cause data loss that Microsoft and Google are not responsible for recovering. Acronis^® backs up mailboxes, calendars, contacts, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams data on a schedule you control, with full recovery options.

Yes. We carry out regular restore tests to verify that backups are viable and that recovery procedures work as expected. Untested backups are one of the most common causes of recovery failure when businesses actually need them. We document test results and flag any issues so they're resolved before an incident occurs, not during one.

We monitor storage usage as part of our managed service and alert you when usage approaches your allocation threshold. We can increase your storage allocation with minimal notice, and you only pay for what you use. We also review your retention policies periodically to ensure you're not holding backups longer than necessary, which keeps storage costs down.

Yes, monthly billing is available with a minimum 12-month initial term. We also offer annual payment for clients who prefer to fix costs for the year, which carries a small discount. There's no tie-in beyond the initial 12 months and you can adjust your service level as your needs change.

Cloud-only backup stores all your backups in the Acronis^® cloud. Recovery speed is limited by your internet download speed, which can mean hours or days for a full server restore. Hybrid DR adds a local on-site appliance so recent backups are always available for fast recovery without internet dependency. If your site is affected by a disaster, the cloud copy ensures nothing is permanently lost. For any business where downtime has a measurable cost, hybrid DR is the better choice.

Yes. Acronis^® Cyber Protect provides image-level backup of virtual machines running on VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as physical servers and workstations. We can back up entire VM images and restore them to the same or alternative hardware, including cloud infrastructure, in the event of a host failure.

A Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of time your business can tolerate being without a system or application following an incident. For example, if losing access to your email server for 4 hours is acceptable but 24 hours would cause serious damage, your RTO for email is 4 hours. We use RTOs to design your backup and recovery solution: systems with short RTOs get local backups and fast restore processes, while lower-priority systems may rely on cloud-only recovery. Defining RTOs before an incident is essential to building a solution that meets your actual business needs.