AIMultiple’s July 2, 2026 disaster-recovery benchmark found Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud restoring a Windows Server 2022 workload in 73 seconds and Ubuntu 24.04 in roughly 108 seconds, while Comet Backup and MSP360 Managed Backup required manual restore-to-VM procedures measured in tens of minutes. The test matters because it did not ask the usual backup question — “Can the data be restored?” — but the operationally uglier one: “How quickly can the service return on different infrastructure?” As reported by AIMultiple and corroborated by vendor documentation from Acronis, Comet, and MSP360, the answer splits the field less by integrity than by orchestration. All three restored clean data; only one behaved like a disaster-recovery system.
The most important line in AIMultiple’s benchmark is not Acronis’ 73-second Windows recovery time, although that is the number that will make the sales decks. The more revealing finding is that Acronis, Comet, and MSP360 all produced byte-exact recoveries against the pre-disaster baseline. The 50-file SHA-256 manifest matched, the database checksum matched, and the ransomware-style corruption was gone.
That means this was not a story about backup reliability in the narrow sense. The products did the thing backup products are supposed to do: preserve recoverable state. The benchmark instead exposed the widening gap between having a restorable image and having a machine back online, reachable, correctly networked, and verified after the original server has been declared lost.
That distinction is easy to blur in marketing language. “Cloud DR,” “DRaaS,” “instant restore,” and “bare-metal recovery” often sit near each other on vendor pages, but they describe very different operational realities. AIMultiple’s test usefully turned those phrases into a stopwatch, a health probe, and a checksum.
The practical lesson for WindowsForum’s audience is blunt: if your disaster-recovery plan begins with “restore the image somewhere,” you may have a good backup plan. You do not necessarily have a disaster-recovery plan.
That tracks with Acronis’ own disaster-recovery documentation, which describes runbooks as instructions for launching a production environment in the cloud. The important part is not merely that Acronis can boot a server elsewhere. It is that the product models recovery as an ordered process: start this server, wait for ping, check this port, gate this step, continue to the next dependency, and validate the outcome.
That is what separates an orchestrated failover from a restore job. A restore job is a file or image operation. A failover is a service operation. One asks whether blocks were copied; the other asks whether the workload is alive.
AIMultiple’s benchmark rewarded that distinction heavily. Acronis scored 91 overall, compared with 35 for Comet and 21 for MSP360. The gap was not because Comet and MSP360 could not restore data. It was because they left the surrounding work — target provisioning, boot validation, networking, and reprotection — to the human operator.
There is a caveat, and it is an important one. AIMultiple reported that an Acronis failover attempt against a recovery point captured while a backup was still running produced a recovery server stuck in journal recovery. The automated test failover caught the bad boot condition and marked it as a failure, and a redo against a known-good recovery point succeeded. That is a mark in Acronis’ favor on detection, but also a reminder that orchestration does not magically make every recovery point safe.
That matters because recovery testing is where many backup programs quietly collapse. Backups are scheduled, dashboards turn green, and restore tests get deferred until the day someone actually needs them. A test failover that boots an isolated recovery server and validates the result does not eliminate the need for human drills, but it changes the default from trust to evidence.
Comet’s “Simulate restore only” did not qualify in the benchmark because it does not boot a machine. MSP360’s restore verification goes further by building and booting a Hyper-V VM, but AIMultiple notes that it depends on local Hyper-V and validates a backup rather than failing over to a recovery site. That is useful, but it is not the same operational object.
For administrators, the distinction is subtle until it is not. A backup verification feature can tell you that an image is plausible. A failover test can tell you whether the service would plausibly come back somewhere else. In a ransomware incident, that difference is the line between a dashboard and a war room.
That does not make Comet a bad backup product. In the test, Comet recovered the ransomware-hit Ubuntu server byte-exact and externally reachable on a fresh host. The disk-image write itself took about two minutes. The problem was everything around that disk write.
The full procedure took 15 to 25 minutes because it was a manual recovery chain: boot rescue media, install or access the agent, restore to a physical device, rewrite networking, reboot, and verify the service. Each of those steps is understandable. Each is also a place where an exhausted operator can lose time during an incident.
Comet’s target reach is respectable. Its documentation describes disk-image restore paths for physical hardware and virtual environments, including VMware-compatible formats and recovery media. AIMultiple credited it with five of seven destination categories, including bare metal, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, Proxmox, and AWS or Azure via virtual disk export.
But that breadth should not be confused with orchestration. Exporting a disk image that can eventually become a VM is not the same as failing over a workload. Comet’s benchmark result is a good reminder that portability is not continuity.
On Windows, MSP360 looked much closer to Comet’s recovery class. AIMultiple restored a full-disk image, used GPT-to-BIOS/MBR conversion for a BIOS-mode recovery host, booted Windows Server on separate hardware, corrected networking, and reached an external health probe with byte-exact data. The restore engine produced the bootable image in five to six minutes, while the full end-to-end restore-to-VM process landed in the same 15-to-25-minute manual range as Comet.
The firmware conversion is not a minor detail. Anyone who has restored Windows images across dissimilar hardware knows that boot mode mismatch can turn a theoretically valid image into a dead end. MSP360’s ability to rebuild the boot configuration for BIOS from a UEFI/GPT source is the sort of practical recovery feature that earns trust in the field.
MSP360 also has broad target support. AIMultiple credited it with physical disk restore, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, VirtualBox, Amazon EC2, Azure VM, and Google Cloud Instance paths, making it the only product in the test with a native Google Compute Engine route. On raw destination count, it tied Acronis at six of seven.
And yet the same caveat returns: breadth is not failover. MSP360’s own material discusses image-based backup, restore verification, and restore destinations, but the benchmark found no recovery server, no runbook, and no managed DR cloud. For a Windows-only shop that accepts manual recovery, MSP360 may be a viable backup-and-restore tool. For a mixed Windows and Linux estate, the Linux image gap is decisive.
This is exactly the kind of problem that does not show up in a backup-completion report. The disk image is fine. The operating system boots. The data is clean. The service is still unreachable because the restored machine believes it is the original machine on the original network.
In a lab, that is a fix. In a real incident, it can become a meeting. Which address should the recovered service use? Who controls DNS? Is the firewall expecting the old subnet? Does the application have bound addresses? Are monitoring and allowlists tied to the old host?
Acronis’ advantage was not that networking disappeared. It was that the product treated networking as part of the recovery design. AIMultiple notes cloud-only mode, site-to-site OpenVPN, multi-site IPsec, point-to-site VPN, per-server public IPs, and custom DNS options. It also notes the absence of a built-in public DNS A-record reroute, which is a fair limitation.
The larger point is that disaster recovery is not storage with better branding. It is compute, identity, routing, firewalling, address management, and application sequencing under time pressure. Manual restore products can absolutely be used in a DR plan, but the plan has to supply everything the product does not.
AIMultiple was careful about this distinction. Comet’s disk-image write took about two minutes. MSP360’s restore engine produced the bootable image in five to six minutes. The longer total came from the surrounding steps: provisioning, moving images, booting, fixing networking, and checking service availability.
That means the manual products are not merely slower because their engines are sluggish. They are slower because their recovery process is less productized. The operator is the orchestration layer.
That also means the timing range may understate the real-world spread. A calm benchmark operator with a known workload, prepared credentials, and a fixed target environment is not the same as a three-person MSP team recovering ten clients after a regional outage or ransomware event. Manual steps scale badly when every customer is an emergency.
This is where RTO becomes less of a metric and more of a promise. If a vendor cannot specify which parts of the workflow it automates, the customer inherits the uncertainty. “We can restore to Azure” is not the same as “your application will answer in Azure within five minutes.”
Comet and MSP360 offer meaningful recovery capabilities, but AIMultiple’s findings place them in a different category. They can restore images to machines, virtual disks, hypervisors, and cloud targets. They do not, in this benchmark, provide the failover engine that turns backup state into a running service with minimal operator action.
This is not semantic nitpicking. Procurement teams buy acronyms, but incidents consume procedures. If a product’s “Cloud DR” story requires an operator to provision infrastructure, restore a disk, repair networking, and validate application health, then the customer should budget for that labor and test it regularly.
The danger is not that vendors use expansive language. The danger is that customers translate expansive language into compressed recovery expectations. A backup platform with broad restore targets can be the foundation of a DR strategy, but it is not automatically the strategy.
A better buying question is not “Do you support DRaaS?” It is “Show me the runbook, the recovery server, the test failover, the network mapping, the failback process, and the last successful automated validation.” If the answer is a restore wizard, you know what you are buying.
That is better than the manual products, where failback is essentially the same restore process in reverse. Comet and MSP360 had no delta-sync failback and no automated reprotect in the benchmark. Once the emergency server is live, the administrator still has to decide how to get back to normal without losing the changes made during the temporary run.
This is often where DR plans become improvised. The restored workload is running, executives declare victory, and the technical debt moves into the next maintenance window. But the environment is now split between the old failed source, the temporary recovery target, the backup repository, and whatever state changed after failover.
Acronis does not make that complexity vanish, especially when returning to original hardware. But it at least treats failback as a lifecycle stage. The manual products treat it as another restore job, which may be acceptable for small environments but becomes risky as application state changes accumulate.
For Windows shops, the implication is clear: test not only failover, but return. A plan that gets a domain controller, SQL server, or line-of-business app running in a cloud VM is only half-tested until you know how it comes home.
AIMultiple’s disaster simulation was controlled and reversible, not real malware. It encoded files into locked copies, overwrote database rows with a ransomware marker, and left the operating system running. That design isolated the recovery task: the products had to recover from a known-good image to separate infrastructure and prove the clean state returned.
Some readers may object that this is a narrow test. It is. It used two cloud servers, a small deterministic workload, a 75 GB disk, and a specific scoring rubric. It did not model Active Directory dependencies, multi-tier ERP stacks, multi-terabyte databases, identity compromise, or cloud account lockout.
But narrow tests can still be revealing when they measure the right boundary. Here the boundary was not backup creation. It was the transition from corrupted production to externally reachable recovery. Even with a small workload, the manual products exposed the same categories of work that become painful at scale.
The result is less a universal ranking than a useful classification. Acronis behaved like DRaaS. Comet behaved like a portable image-backup product. MSP360 behaved like a capable Windows image-recovery product with a major Linux limitation. Those are different tools, even if all three live in the backup aisle.
The next standard is rehearsal. Can the product run the failover non-disruptively? Can it validate boot? Can it check application ports? Can it sequence dependent systems? Can it assign networking predictably? Can it document RTO and RPO compliance without a spreadsheet archaeology project?
Acronis is closer to that model in this benchmark because runbooks and automated test failover make rehearsal part of the product. MSP360’s Hyper-V restore verification is a partial step in the same direction, but AIMultiple correctly limited its credit because it validates locally and depends on a hypervisor that may not exist on cloud test hosts. Comet’s dry-run restore simulation is useful for catching restore-plan mistakes, but it does not answer the boot-and-service question.
This is where IT buyers should resist feature-count shopping. A product that reaches six target types but requires manual assembly may be less useful during a real outage than a product that reaches fewer targets but can rehearse and execute the recovery path. The right answer depends on the environment, but the tradeoff must be explicit.
The benchmark also suggests a cultural shift. Backup administrators used to be judged on whether data could be recovered. Increasingly, they will be judged on whether a service can be resumed within an agreed window. That is a different job.
The Backup Worked, and That Was the Least Interesting Result
The most important line in AIMultiple’s benchmark is not Acronis’ 73-second Windows recovery time, although that is the number that will make the sales decks. The more revealing finding is that Acronis, Comet, and MSP360 all produced byte-exact recoveries against the pre-disaster baseline. The 50-file SHA-256 manifest matched, the database checksum matched, and the ransomware-style corruption was gone.That means this was not a story about backup reliability in the narrow sense. The products did the thing backup products are supposed to do: preserve recoverable state. The benchmark instead exposed the widening gap between having a restorable image and having a machine back online, reachable, correctly networked, and verified after the original server has been declared lost.
That distinction is easy to blur in marketing language. “Cloud DR,” “DRaaS,” “instant restore,” and “bare-metal recovery” often sit near each other on vendor pages, but they describe very different operational realities. AIMultiple’s test usefully turned those phrases into a stopwatch, a health probe, and a checksum.
The practical lesson for WindowsForum’s audience is blunt: if your disaster-recovery plan begins with “restore the image somewhere,” you may have a good backup plan. You do not necessarily have a disaster-recovery plan.
Acronis Wins Because It Treats Recovery as a Workflow
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud’s advantage came from the fact that it has a disaster-recovery engine at all. In AIMultiple’s test, the product recovered the Windows workload in 73 seconds and the Linux workload in about 108 seconds from a runbook-driven failover into the Acronis cloud. The recovered server received a public IP automatically and served the application externally without an operator walking through provisioning, disk writing, network repair, and reboot sequencing.That tracks with Acronis’ own disaster-recovery documentation, which describes runbooks as instructions for launching a production environment in the cloud. The important part is not merely that Acronis can boot a server elsewhere. It is that the product models recovery as an ordered process: start this server, wait for ping, check this port, gate this step, continue to the next dependency, and validate the outcome.
That is what separates an orchestrated failover from a restore job. A restore job is a file or image operation. A failover is a service operation. One asks whether blocks were copied; the other asks whether the workload is alive.
AIMultiple’s benchmark rewarded that distinction heavily. Acronis scored 91 overall, compared with 35 for Comet and 21 for MSP360. The gap was not because Comet and MSP360 could not restore data. It was because they left the surrounding work — target provisioning, boot validation, networking, and reprotection — to the human operator.
There is a caveat, and it is an important one. AIMultiple reported that an Acronis failover attempt against a recovery point captured while a backup was still running produced a recovery server stuck in journal recovery. The automated test failover caught the bad boot condition and marked it as a failure, and a redo against a known-good recovery point succeeded. That is a mark in Acronis’ favor on detection, but also a reminder that orchestration does not magically make every recovery point safe.
The Screenshot Validator Is More Than a Gimmick
Automated test failover sounds like a feature built for compliance screenshots, and in many environments that is exactly how it will be used. But AIMultiple’s Acronis result shows why test failover is more than paperwork. The product’s AI screenshot validation reportedly flagged a Linux recovery server stuck in journal recovery as a failed boot, then correctly passed a clean Windows boot.That matters because recovery testing is where many backup programs quietly collapse. Backups are scheduled, dashboards turn green, and restore tests get deferred until the day someone actually needs them. A test failover that boots an isolated recovery server and validates the result does not eliminate the need for human drills, but it changes the default from trust to evidence.
Comet’s “Simulate restore only” did not qualify in the benchmark because it does not boot a machine. MSP360’s restore verification goes further by building and booting a Hyper-V VM, but AIMultiple notes that it depends on local Hyper-V and validates a backup rather than failing over to a recovery site. That is useful, but it is not the same operational object.
For administrators, the distinction is subtle until it is not. A backup verification feature can tell you that an image is plausible. A failover test can tell you whether the service would plausibly come back somewhere else. In a ransomware incident, that difference is the line between a dashboard and a war room.
Comet Shows the Strength and Limit of Honest Backup
Comet Backup’s showing is almost refreshingly straightforward. AIMultiple found that Comet has no recovery server, no runbook, no one-click failover, and no real test failover. Its disaster-recovery guide, according to the benchmark and Comet’s documentation, is more about protecting Comet’s own management console and storage infrastructure than orchestrating customer workload failover.That does not make Comet a bad backup product. In the test, Comet recovered the ransomware-hit Ubuntu server byte-exact and externally reachable on a fresh host. The disk-image write itself took about two minutes. The problem was everything around that disk write.
The full procedure took 15 to 25 minutes because it was a manual recovery chain: boot rescue media, install or access the agent, restore to a physical device, rewrite networking, reboot, and verify the service. Each of those steps is understandable. Each is also a place where an exhausted operator can lose time during an incident.
Comet’s target reach is respectable. Its documentation describes disk-image restore paths for physical hardware and virtual environments, including VMware-compatible formats and recovery media. AIMultiple credited it with five of seven destination categories, including bare metal, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, Proxmox, and AWS or Azure via virtual disk export.
But that breadth should not be confused with orchestration. Exporting a disk image that can eventually become a VM is not the same as failing over a workload. Comet’s benchmark result is a good reminder that portability is not continuity.
MSP360’s Windows Recovery Is Better Than Its Cross-OS Score Suggests
MSP360’s 21 weighted score looks brutal, but the number needs unpacking. AIMMultiple scored Windows and Linux separately and averaged them. MSP360’s Linux agent is file-level only according to the vendor’s own edition comparison, so it had no image-based Linux disaster recovery to score. That zero on half the benchmark dragged down the total.On Windows, MSP360 looked much closer to Comet’s recovery class. AIMultiple restored a full-disk image, used GPT-to-BIOS/MBR conversion for a BIOS-mode recovery host, booted Windows Server on separate hardware, corrected networking, and reached an external health probe with byte-exact data. The restore engine produced the bootable image in five to six minutes, while the full end-to-end restore-to-VM process landed in the same 15-to-25-minute manual range as Comet.
The firmware conversion is not a minor detail. Anyone who has restored Windows images across dissimilar hardware knows that boot mode mismatch can turn a theoretically valid image into a dead end. MSP360’s ability to rebuild the boot configuration for BIOS from a UEFI/GPT source is the sort of practical recovery feature that earns trust in the field.
MSP360 also has broad target support. AIMultiple credited it with physical disk restore, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, VirtualBox, Amazon EC2, Azure VM, and Google Cloud Instance paths, making it the only product in the test with a native Google Compute Engine route. On raw destination count, it tied Acronis at six of seven.
And yet the same caveat returns: breadth is not failover. MSP360’s own material discusses image-based backup, restore verification, and restore destinations, but the benchmark found no recovery server, no runbook, and no managed DR cloud. For a Windows-only shop that accepts manual recovery, MSP360 may be a viable backup-and-restore tool. For a mixed Windows and Linux estate, the Linux image gap is decisive.
The Network Is Where Manual Recovery Gets Humbling
The benchmark’s most sysadmin-realistic finding may be the one that sounds least glamorous: both manual products restored machines with the source server’s static IP configuration. On Comet’s Ubuntu recovery, AIMultiple had to rewrite netplan in the rescue environment. On MSP360’s Windows recovery, the operator had to use the cloud console to set the correct static IP after boot.This is exactly the kind of problem that does not show up in a backup-completion report. The disk image is fine. The operating system boots. The data is clean. The service is still unreachable because the restored machine believes it is the original machine on the original network.
In a lab, that is a fix. In a real incident, it can become a meeting. Which address should the recovered service use? Who controls DNS? Is the firewall expecting the old subnet? Does the application have bound addresses? Are monitoring and allowlists tied to the old host?
Acronis’ advantage was not that networking disappeared. It was that the product treated networking as part of the recovery design. AIMultiple notes cloud-only mode, site-to-site OpenVPN, multi-site IPsec, point-to-site VPN, per-server public IPs, and custom DNS options. It also notes the absence of a built-in public DNS A-record reroute, which is a fair limitation.
The larger point is that disaster recovery is not storage with better branding. It is compute, identity, routing, firewalling, address management, and application sequencing under time pressure. Manual restore products can absolutely be used in a DR plan, but the plan has to supply everything the product does not.
The RTO Numbers Are Really Labor Numbers
The headline timing gap — 73 seconds versus 15 to 25 minutes — is easy to read as a pure performance comparison. That is only partly right. The Acronis number measures an automated failover path. The Comet and MSP360 numbers measure a human-driven recovery process with machine work inside it.AIMultiple was careful about this distinction. Comet’s disk-image write took about two minutes. MSP360’s restore engine produced the bootable image in five to six minutes. The longer total came from the surrounding steps: provisioning, moving images, booting, fixing networking, and checking service availability.
That means the manual products are not merely slower because their engines are sluggish. They are slower because their recovery process is less productized. The operator is the orchestration layer.
That also means the timing range may understate the real-world spread. A calm benchmark operator with a known workload, prepared credentials, and a fixed target environment is not the same as a three-person MSP team recovering ten clients after a regional outage or ransomware event. Manual steps scale badly when every customer is an emergency.
This is where RTO becomes less of a metric and more of a promise. If a vendor cannot specify which parts of the workflow it automates, the customer inherits the uncertainty. “We can restore to Azure” is not the same as “your application will answer in Azure within five minutes.”
DRaaS Has Become a Marketing Word in Need of a Stopwatch
The benchmark’s most useful contribution may be its implicit definition of disaster recovery-as-a-service. In the strict sense, DRaaS means the vendor provides or manages the recovery environment and orchestrates failover into it. By that standard, Acronis fits the label in this test: a recovery server, a runbook, test failover, and cloud-side execution.Comet and MSP360 offer meaningful recovery capabilities, but AIMultiple’s findings place them in a different category. They can restore images to machines, virtual disks, hypervisors, and cloud targets. They do not, in this benchmark, provide the failover engine that turns backup state into a running service with minimal operator action.
This is not semantic nitpicking. Procurement teams buy acronyms, but incidents consume procedures. If a product’s “Cloud DR” story requires an operator to provision infrastructure, restore a disk, repair networking, and validate application health, then the customer should budget for that labor and test it regularly.
The danger is not that vendors use expansive language. The danger is that customers translate expansive language into compressed recovery expectations. A backup platform with broad restore targets can be the foundation of a DR strategy, but it is not automatically the strategy.
A better buying question is not “Do you support DRaaS?” It is “Show me the runbook, the recovery server, the test failover, the network mapping, the failback process, and the last successful automated validation.” If the answer is a restore wizard, you know what you are buying.
Failback Remains the Unsexy Half of the Problem
AIMultiple’s benchmark focused on getting the workload back online, but its failback findings deserve attention. Acronis offers a four-phase delta failback process with planning, data transfer, switchover, and validation, while the cloud server stays live during transfer. Returning to original hardware still requires bootable media and manual reprotection.That is better than the manual products, where failback is essentially the same restore process in reverse. Comet and MSP360 had no delta-sync failback and no automated reprotect in the benchmark. Once the emergency server is live, the administrator still has to decide how to get back to normal without losing the changes made during the temporary run.
This is often where DR plans become improvised. The restored workload is running, executives declare victory, and the technical debt moves into the next maintenance window. But the environment is now split between the old failed source, the temporary recovery target, the backup repository, and whatever state changed after failover.
Acronis does not make that complexity vanish, especially when returning to original hardware. But it at least treats failback as a lifecycle stage. The manual products treat it as another restore job, which may be acceptable for small environments but becomes risky as application state changes accumulate.
For Windows shops, the implication is clear: test not only failover, but return. A plan that gets a domain controller, SQL server, or line-of-business app running in a cloud VM is only half-tested until you know how it comes home.
This Benchmark Rewards the Thing Ransomware Punishes Least Forgivingly
Ransomware changed backup evaluation because it changed the failure mode. The problem is no longer simply that a disk died or a user deleted a folder. The problem is that the production environment may be untrusted, damaged, encrypted, or politically unavailable while the business is asking when service returns.AIMultiple’s disaster simulation was controlled and reversible, not real malware. It encoded files into locked copies, overwrote database rows with a ransomware marker, and left the operating system running. That design isolated the recovery task: the products had to recover from a known-good image to separate infrastructure and prove the clean state returned.
Some readers may object that this is a narrow test. It is. It used two cloud servers, a small deterministic workload, a 75 GB disk, and a specific scoring rubric. It did not model Active Directory dependencies, multi-tier ERP stacks, multi-terabyte databases, identity compromise, or cloud account lockout.
But narrow tests can still be revealing when they measure the right boundary. Here the boundary was not backup creation. It was the transition from corrupted production to externally reachable recovery. Even with a small workload, the manual products exposed the same categories of work that become painful at scale.
The result is less a universal ranking than a useful classification. Acronis behaved like DRaaS. Comet behaved like a portable image-backup product. MSP360 behaved like a capable Windows image-recovery product with a major Linux limitation. Those are different tools, even if all three live in the backup aisle.
The Table Stakes Have Moved From Restore to Rehearsal
For years, backup advice has centered on the restore test: do not trust a backup until you have restored it. That advice remains true, but it is now incomplete. A restore test that produces a disk image or boots a VM on a technician’s bench does not prove business recovery.The next standard is rehearsal. Can the product run the failover non-disruptively? Can it validate boot? Can it check application ports? Can it sequence dependent systems? Can it assign networking predictably? Can it document RTO and RPO compliance without a spreadsheet archaeology project?
Acronis is closer to that model in this benchmark because runbooks and automated test failover make rehearsal part of the product. MSP360’s Hyper-V restore verification is a partial step in the same direction, but AIMultiple correctly limited its credit because it validates locally and depends on a hypervisor that may not exist on cloud test hosts. Comet’s dry-run restore simulation is useful for catching restore-plan mistakes, but it does not answer the boot-and-service question.
This is where IT buyers should resist feature-count shopping. A product that reaches six target types but requires manual assembly may be less useful during a real outage than a product that reaches fewer targets but can rehearse and execute the recovery path. The right answer depends on the environment, but the tradeoff must be explicit.
The benchmark also suggests a cultural shift. Backup administrators used to be judged on whether data could be recovered. Increasingly, they will be judged on whether a service can be resumed within an agreed window. That is a different job.
The Practical Read From a 73-Second Windows Failover
The benchmark does not say every organization should buy Acronis, nor does it say Comet and MSP360 are poor backup tools. It says the products occupy different operational categories, and that the category matters more than the logo when the building is on fire.- Acronis was the only tested product with an orchestrated failover engine, and that is why it recovered the Windows workload in 73 seconds and Linux in roughly 108 seconds.
- Comet and MSP360 restored clean data, but their recovery paths depended on manual provisioning, disk restore, boot handling, and network repair.
- MSP360’s low cross-OS score was driven by Linux image-backup absence, while its Windows restore result was much closer to Comet’s manual recovery class.
- Target breadth did not decide the benchmark, because Acronis and MSP360 both reached six of seven destination categories while delivering very different recovery experiences.
- Automated test failover is not a compliance luxury; it caught a bad Acronis recovery point that reached a hung journal-recovery state.
- Buyers should treat “DRaaS” claims skeptically unless the product includes a recovery server, a runbook, a test failover mechanism, and a credible failback path.
References
- Primary source: AIMultiple
Published: 2026-07-03T18:40:12.149535
Disaster Recovery Benchmark: Acronis vs Comet vs MSP360
aimultiple.com
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