Anyone using Acronis Backup Software

[Brian Ashton]

I've been mulling over this software but can't find a specific answer to a question I have... So maybe someone here who uses it can answer for me. With the backup that's created by Acronis can you take the external HDD to any pc and access the files without having to use Acronis to read them. I.e. can I open a word or excel file from any computer.

[Grant Wilkinson]

Short answer - No. I used to use Acronis, but moved to another application. The backup file that Acronis creates is a proprietary format. I must stress that I'm talking about Acronis 2013 and previous. I don't believe the newer versions changed this, but you can ask Acronis to be sure.

[Robert Delhommer Sr]

Short answer - No. I used to use Acronis, but moved to another application. The backup file that Acronis creates is a proprietary format. I must stress that I'm talking about Acronis 2013 and previous. I don't believe the newer versions changed this, but you can ask Acronis to be sure.


Grant, what do you use now?

[Brian Ashton]

What r u using? And can the files be read by any computer?

[Chuck Wintle]

I've been mulling over this software but can't find a specific answer to a question I have... So maybe someone here who uses it can answer for me. With the backup that's created by Acronis can you take the external HDD to any pc and access the files without having to use Acronis to read them. I.e. can I open a word or excel file from any computer.
if you need to back up specific files like such as word or excel then use one of many free backup programs and copy to an external drive. Windows has its own image backup utility but individual files are not accessible.

[roger wiegand]

I use Crashplan at home and at work and it is excellent for both backup and recovery. It's not meant for simple file transfer, a free Dropbox account works fine for that, but I have recovered files both between computers of similar sorts and across platforms (Mac and PC). I've unfortunately tested the recovery side several times recently and it's been flawless.

I like the fact that it will maintain multiple backups simultaneously, both locally and remotely. The local backup (to a NAS in my case) is fast, but the cloud backup will be there after the house burns down.

It also keeps historical snapshots, which just saved my bacon when I lost my wife's old email during an upgrade. I was able to restore a version of her mailbox from a year ago and grab all the old mail from that.

I back up six computers at home and to their cloud server all for one fairly reasonable fee. The free version lets you back up between different computers across the net if you know someone with extra disk space.

You would need to install the crashplan app on a computer you want to recover to, but it is free.

[Grant Wilkinson]

I'm using Nova Backup now. It won't do what the OP wants, either, though. There are free backup applications out there that "back up" by compressing the files into a zip file. You could use pretty much anything, including windows built in to retrieve individual files on another pc. Most of the back up applications that I looked at used a proprietary back up file type.

[Jerome Stanek]

I just write files to my nas and any computer can pull them off

[Scott Pierce]

I used to use Acronis, and to do anything with the backup archive (like retrieve an individual file), you need to use the Acronis program, so you couldn't go to another computer that didn't have Acronis and work with your backup.
Now I just use the free Windows backup that comes with Windows 7. It also lets you retrieve individual files, but the computer has to have the Windows backup program (which any Windows 7 computer would).

[Curt Harms]

For files that I may need to access individually, it's hard to beat just copying the folder or whatever uncompressed to a storage device. Pretty big flash drives and portable hard drives are pretty cheap these days. To back up an entire drive or partition I use this:

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-linux.htm

I like the idea that the disk/partition being backed up isn't active at all so no chance of file locking not working as expected. IFL is supposed to be able to extract a file from an archive but I've never tried it. I have restored Windows archives from DVD and it worked perfectly. The DVD backups were self restoring, I don't know about restoring from a flash drive or hard drive, but I kind of doubt those are self restoring.