Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/06/24/acronis_intros_tim_for_mac/

Backup bods Acronis extend disk-imaging support to Macs at last

Fear not, fanbois, the goodness is coming to you too

By Chris Mellor

Posted in Storage, 24th June 2014 08:31 GMT

Data protection house Acronis is announcing True Image for Mac (TIM - our acronym), the Apple equivalent of its True Image for Windows backup and recovery software.

True Image is a full disk image backup utility. Up until now, TIM has only supported Windows. It does not run on Macs, either under Mac OS X, or with Windows running in Macs under environments like Acronis' own Parallels.

There is also an Acronis Backup and Recovery for Mac product, using ExtremeZ-IP and Acronis Backup & Recovery.

There are more than enough Apple Macs around, Acronis says, to make this worthwhile, claiming that more than 50 per cent of American households own an Apple product. That stat includes iPads, iPods and iPhones, so it's not that impressive.

We're told by Acronis: "ExtremeZ-IP provides seamless integration of Macs in corporate IT environments that are powered by Windows servers and Active Directory. One of its features allows the OS X backup tool 'Time Machine' to use a corporate file server as a central store for the Mac archives. Acronis Backup & Recovery can then be used to back up these Time Machine vaults to disk, SAN, tape, and/or the cloud for archiving and disaster recovery."

An Acronis spokesperson added: "Those are all enterprise-level tools, while True Image for Mac is largely a consumer/prosumer tool that anyone can use."

TIM''s first release offers full image backup and recovery, scheduling and versioning. Apple's own Time Machine offers file backup and not full operating system image backup. It ensures that all of the data on the Mac machine is protected, backed up locally and/or to the Acronis cloud and recoverable.

An Acronis spokesperson said it was a "kind of a 'set it and forget it' approach that’s super easy for your non-technical Mac user to understand."

In more detail TIM offers:

In comparison to Apple's own Time Machine the Acronis spokesperson said: "Time Machine is great, but it doesn't protect against hardware failure/destruction and is inflexible, doesn't allow for incremental backups for virtual machines and True Image for Mac allows for much more flexible backup schedules (no more "do you want to back up to Time Machine" reminders)."

However there are unsupported configurations:

These gaps should be fixed by the end of the year with a coming release. True Image for Mac, supporting iMacs and MacBooks, is available now and costs $49.99 (MSRP). Three Macs can get supported for $79.99. Acronis cloud storage options start at $2.99/month for 50GB. ®