Acronis True Image 2018 protects against ransomware

Acronis True Image 2018 is the newest version of the company's personal backup software for devices running Windows and Mac operating systems.

The commercial backup software comes with a range of new features, among them a security feature called Active Protection Technology that protects Windows devices against ransomware attacks.

The anti-ransomware technology protects Acronis True Image, back up data, and system data against ransomware threats.

It runs in the background and uses behavioral analysis to detect malicious patterns. When it detects malicious activity, it tries to stop the process that is responsible for the activity.

If data was encrypted by the process, backups may be used to restore the files provided that backups exist.

Acronis True Image 2018 users may open Active Protection in the program's interface to manage the anti-ransomware component of the backup software.

The screen highlights the status of the feature, lists monitored processes, and provides a summary of activity. Active Protection can be turned off there; this is useful if another anti-ransomware solution is enabled on a system, or if the protection is causing issues on the system.

Suspicious processes are listed under "manage processes" in the interface. These are not blocked, however and the list included only legitimate processes on a test system (Windows Firewall Control, Veeam EndPoint Backup and rundll32.exe).

You may add applications to the whitelist so that they are never detected as threats by the application. The process is not super comfortable however as you cannot just add the suspicious processes but need to use a file browser instead for that. An option to add suspicious processes directly would improve the usability.

The second option that Active Protection comes with is to exclude files or folders from the ransomware protection.

Other features of Acronis True Image 2018

Acronis True Image 2018 comes with additional new features and updates of existing features.

• Active Cloning lets you clone an active Windows system to a local drive or USB drive while it is running. Snapshots can be created this way, and it is possible to boot from these new disks afterwards.
• Convert to Virtual Hard Drive. Create a virtual hard drive image of the Windows system, and use it in virtual machines.
• Better incremental backup performance. New changed block tracker technology improves the performance of incremental backups by up-to the factor three for smaller changes (30% of disk or less).
• Backup Activity and Statistics. The new dashboard highlights the status of backups, displays information about each job.
• Wireless mobile backup to NAS. Back up mobile devices running Android or iOS to network-attached storage, or local PC or Mac devices using Wi-Fi.

Closing Words

The new version of Acronis True Image 2018 is available for $49.99, and as a free trial version. Integration of anti-ransomware technology in the backup solution sets it apart from other backup solutions, provided that the protection works as reliably as advertised.