Acronis vs SnapShooter

Acronis is a Swiss-headquartered cyber protection company founded in 2003, known for its True Image disk imaging software and, today, mainly for a multitenant platform that managed service providers use to back up, secure and manage their clients' systems. EQT agreed in 2024 to take a majority stake, and Acronis says more than 20,000 service providers and 750,000 businesses use its platform.

The business offering, marketed as the Acronis Cyber Platform and sold to service providers as Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, combines backup of servers, PCs, VMs and Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace with disaster recovery, EDR and MDR, email security, data loss prevention, patching, RMM and PSA-style billing and service desk tools. MSPs pay per workload for actual usage; IT departments buy one to three year terms. The consumer line, Acronis True Image, is sold per year: Essentials for local backup and cloning, Advanced with cloud storage and anti-malware, and Premium with 1 TB or more of cloud storage.

Acronis fits MSPs that want one console for backup, security and RMM, and home or small-office users who need full-disk images and cloning. Backblaze is simpler and cheaper for plain cloud backup, Afi.ai focuses on SaaS backup for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and Veeam is the usual choice for large virtualized data centers.

Buying tip: True Image prices rise with each extra computer and terabyte, so a 3 or 5 computer pack is better value for households. MSPs should check which security modules they already license elsewhere.

SnapShooter is a backup service for servers, volumes, databases and files hosted on cloud and VPS providers. It was founded in the UK as a bootstrapped company and acquired by DigitalOcean in 2023, and it is popular with developers and small teams who run their own infrastructure rather than a fully managed platform.

The service connects to providers such as DigitalOcean, AWS, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode and UpCloud through their APIs to schedule provider-level snapshots of droplets, instances and volumes. For more portable backups, it runs jobs over SSH that dump MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis databases or archive files and directories, then uploads them to S3-compatible storage you control, such as Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi or DigitalOcean Spaces. Retention rules, schedules, notifications and one-click restores are configured in a web dashboard. Plans are inexpensive and priced by the number of jobs and resources, with a small free tier.

SnapShooter fits indie developers, agencies and SaaS founders running apps on VPS servers who want automated, offsite backups without writing scripts. It is not built for enterprise backup requirements such as compliance reporting or endpoint protection. Teams comfortable with the command line can achieve similar results for free with restic or BorgBackup, while SimpleBackups is the closest hosted competitor. Because the product now sits inside DigitalOcean, check its current plans and roadmap before adopting it for non-DigitalOcean infrastructure.