8 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2015
2 Backup
In this section
Basic concepts ............................................................................................ 8
What you can and cannot back up ............................................................. 9
Backing up to local or network storage ..................................................... 9
Backing up to Acronis Cloud .................................................................... 10
Scheduling ................................................................................................ 12
Excluding items from backups ................................................................. 12
Selecting Acronis Cloud data center ........................................................ 14
What is Acronis Cloud? ............................................................................ 15
2.1 Basic concepts
Backup and recovery
Backup refers to making copies of data so that they can be used to recover the original data after a
data loss event.
Backups are useful primarily for two purposes:
To recover an operating system (p. 18) when it is corrupted or cannot start. This process is called
disaster recovery. For information about protecting your Mac from a disaster, refer to Backing up
to local or network storage (p. 9) and Backing up to Acronis Cloud (p. 10) for details.
To recover specific files and folders (p. 20) after they have been accidentally deleted or
corrupted.
Backup versions
A backup version is a file created during a backup operation. Each version represents a point in time
to which the system or data can be restored.
The first backup version contains all the data selected for backup. The second and subsequent
versions contain only data changes that occurred since the previous backup version.
Backup file format
When you back up your Mac to a local storage or a network place, Acronis True Image 2015 saves
backup data in the proprietary .tib format, by using compression. The data from .tib file backups can
be recovered only through Acronis True Image 2015.
When you back up your Mac to Acronis Cloud (p. 15), Acronis True Image 2015 saves your data "as
is". You can open the Acronis Cloud web application (p. 15) on any Mac computer and recover the
data.
Schedule
For your backups to be really helpful, they must be as up-to-date as possible. Schedule your backups
(p. 12) to run on a regular basis.
Backup retention rules
Every time you run a backup operation, manually or on a schedule, Acronis True Image 2015 creates
a new backup version in the backup location. A maximum of 10 versions are stored in one location.
This rule applies to both Acronis Cloud and local or network folders. When you create the eleventh
