A. Acronis is a global provider of storage management software that enables corporations and individuals to move, manage and maintain digital assets.  Acronis create innovative solutions for disaster recovery, server consolidation and virtualisation migration, which allow users to maintain business continuity and reduce downtime in computing environments.  Acronis software products are sold in more than 180 countries and are available in 15 languages.

A. No!  Unlike some backup solutions, Acronis True Image can take a full disk image backup of a live computer without interruption to service.  The additional resource utilisation of running the backup can result in a degredation in performance (though the relative priority of the backup process relative to other operations can be reduced to improve responsiveness).  Combined with the fact that at the close of business is often the best point to take a backup, this means most backups are run outside business hours.  However, this is by no means the only option and many of our clients run backups during the day.

Of course, Acronis' continuous protection products such as Acronis Recovery for MS SQL Server run constantly with minimal impact on system performance.

Architecting the correct solution to incorporate considerations such as the above is essential and Cantarus has plenty of experience of doing so.

A. Cantarus' in-house Acronis Certified Engineers have undergone Acronis training courses and passed associated exams to achieve their ACE status, qualifying them to design, implement and support Acronis-based solutions.  Further, the expertise of Cantarus as a business has been recognised by the granting of Certified Partner status by Acronis.

A. Traditional file backup is so-called because it literally copies each individual file on a computer to a backup destination.  In its most basic form, this can involve a user selecting a folder such as 'My Documents' and writing it to a CD or external hard disk drive.  A disk image backup works at a level 'below' individual files - it copies the actual content of the hard disk drive, which of course includes all the files on it.

Since all data on a hard disk drive is captured with the disk image approach, restoration of the entire system to a 'bare metal' (i.e. no operating system installed, etc. - the computer is completely blank) system is much faster.  This is because everything, including the operating system, all files (even 'open' files that were in use when the backup was taken) and configuration is restored in one pass with no need for any manual effort on the user's part.

The Acronis True Image Echo family does also include file backup functionality, so that a subset of files can be backed up should the need arise.  Impressively, Acronis True Image also boasts the ability to restore individual files from the disk image backup rather than restore the entire system.

With Acronis, users truly have the best of both worlds here.

A. The Acronis True Image Echo family is Acronis' leading computer backup software and is available in several editions for business use:

• Workstation (centrally-manageable software for workstations and laptops)
• Server for Linux (standalone backup software for Linux servers)
• Server for Windows (standalone backup software for Microsoft Windows servers)
• Enterprise Server (centrally-manageable software for Microsoft Windows servers)

A. Acronis Snap Deploy is Acronis' comprehensive deployment solution to enable business to rapidly deploy build images over a network to workstations and laptops from a central location.

A. Acronis Universal Restore is a separatelty-licensed plug-in for the Acronis True Image family which enables backup images taken from one physical server to be restored to different hardware or even a virtual machine.  This can be a critical, yet often overlooked, consideration during disaster recovery scenarios where the original hardware is beyond repair, destroyed or otherwise unusable.

A. Acronis Recovery for MS SQL Server is a standalone or separately-licensed plug-in for the Acronis True Image Echo family of products for servers running Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or 2005 databases.

A. This member of the Acronis True Image family is purpose-built for installation on Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) 2000/20003 and supports the Microsoft Exchange email server and Microsoft SQL Server database software that is packaged with the SBS operating system.

A. Acronis Disk Director is a powerful hard disk and partition management utility.  A common uses are the resizing of hard disk system or data partitons on Windows servers where free space has become limited as this avoids the need to rebuild the system from scratch.