Acronis True Image 2014 beta debuts integrated cloud backup

Acronis International has announced the first public beta of its flagship backup tool, Acronis True Image 2014.

The big addition in this release is fully integrated support for backing up your system to Acronis Cloud, the company’s online storage service. Or some of your system, at least (the trial and full versions come with 5GB of storage space, free for 1 year).

Acronis says the online backup and recovery process has been tweaked for extra performance in this release, and True Image 2014′s support for incremental image backup and recovery should also help to improve speeds.

The True Image bootable recovery environment now also fully supports Acronis Cloud. If your system won’t start then you can run an incremental partition recovery from an online backup, getting your system working again with the minimum of hassle.

And there’s new support for creating up to 5 online backups from a single computer, giving you considerable flexibility in deciding what to restore.

As usual with betas, there are plenty of significant issues. The release notes say that the program might crash on certain hardware when recovering a partition from the cloud, for instance, and that "incremental disk recovery from the Cloud may not work, when you recover the backup to another computer". Oops. The current product is for testing only, and you shouldn’t use it as your only backup tool.

If you’re interested in the program then Acronis True Image 2014 is worth a look, though. There are some rewards for the best beta testers, too: the top 10 get licenses for the finished product, while the top 3 also get $100 Amazon gift cards (or "equivalent"). Downloads are available now.