Disaster Recovery Benchmark: Acronis vs Comet vs MSP360

We benchmarked Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, Comet Backup, and MSP360 Managed Backup on disaster recovery rather than backup. Each vendor imaged a live Windows Server 2022 and a live Ubuntu 24.04 server, both running the same deterministic workload. That workload was a web service, a 10,000-row database, and 50 files. A ransomware-style disaster then encrypted the data, and each product recovered the whole machine onto a separate server.

Disaster recovery benchmark results

What each column means:

• Weighted score: the rubric total across the seven dimensions, reported for reference; the benchmark scores each dimension on its own.

• Time to restore: the end-to-end recovery time (RTO), from declaring the failover to the recovered service answering an external probe.

• Failover detection: whether the product can run a test failover and confirm the recovered machine booted, from an automated screenshot check to nothing at all.

• 3rd-party integrations: how many of seven recovery destinations (vendor cloud, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, on-premises hypervisor, cross-region, cross-cloud) the product can recover to.

• DR engine: whether the product orchestrates the failover (a recovery server and runbook) or only restores a backup by hand.

See the full disaster recovery benchmark methodology for the scoring rubric and the T0-T6 timing protocol.

The key insights:

• Acronis recovered the encrypted server in 73 seconds on Windows and about 108 seconds on Linux from a single runbook click. The workload booted on a fresh server inside the vendor cloud, received a public IP automatically, and came back byte-exact clean.

• Comet and MSP360 have no failover engine. Recovery is a manual restore-to-VM that ran in tens of minutes and required an operator at every step: provision a target, write the disk image, reconfigure the network, reboot.

• All three produced a byte-exact recovery. The 50-file SHA-256 manifest and the database checksum matched the pre-disaster baseline in every case, so the difference is speed and operator effort, not data integrity.

Benchmarked disaster recovery products

Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud

Acronis is the only product in the test with a disaster recovery-as-a-service failover engine. It runs a recovery server in the Acronis cloud, fails over from a runbook, and validates the result with automated test failover. It earns its score on automation, recovery speed, and target reach, and its main ceiling is agent-based failback.

Failover automation depth

Runbooks orchestrate the failover: ordered steps, parallel actions inside a step, completion checks on ping and port, manual-approval gates, and nested runbooks. The compliance dashboard tracks RTO and RPO targets, eligible devices, and compute-point quota. This is the only product in the test that codifies the recovery rather than leaving it to an operator.

Test failover capability

The non-disruptive test failover boots the recovery server on an isolated network, and Automated Test Failover validates a scheduled boot with an AI screenshot check. It worked in both directions: a true failure verdict on a Linux server that hung in journal recovery, and a true success on a clean Windows boot.

End-to-end RTO

73 seconds on Windows, about 108 seconds on Linux (94 and 121 across two drills). One runbook click brings up the recovery server, assigns a public IP, and serves the recovered application. The recovered state was byte-exact against the pre-disaster baseline.

RPO

Recovery used a backup three to four minutes old, inside the RPO compliance threshold. The threshold is configurable from 15 minutes to 14 days.

Failback and reprotect

Four-phase delta failback (planning, data transfer, switchover, validation) with the cloud server staying live during transfer. Returning to original hardware needs bootable media and a manual reprotect.

Connectivity and network flexibility

Cloud-only mode needs no VPN appliance. Site-to-site OpenVPN, multi-site IPsec, point-to-site VPN, per-server public IP, and custom DNS are all available. There is no built-in public-DNS A-record reroute.

DR target reach

Six of seven targets. A managed DR site in Acronis Cloud or Azure, Instant Restore to on-premises VMware and Hyper-V, recovery to dissimilar physical hardware, and a documented restore-to-EC2 migration into a customer’s own AWS account. The orchestrated failover itself runs in Acronis Cloud or Azure, so EC2 is reached by manual restore rather than automated failover. Only Google Compute Engine has no documented path.

One reliability note from the drills: a failover attempt against a recovery point taken while a backup was still running came up in a hung journal-recovery state, and the redo against a known-good recovery point succeeded. The recovery server is only as good as the recovery point behind it, so pausing the backup during an incident is the safer sequence.

Comet Backup

Comet is a backup product without a disaster-recovery engine. It scored 0 on failover automation and test failover because it has neither and earned its points on the manual restore-to-VM path and the breadth of restore targets. Its disk-image restore in the benchmark brought a ransomware-hit Ubuntu server back, byte-exact and externally reachable, on a fresh host.

Failover automation depth

None. No recovery server, no runbook, no one-click failover. Recovery is a manual end-to-end procedure. Comet’s own disaster recovery guide does not describe a workload failover; it covers protecting Comet’s own console with replication and re-registering a fresh agent after a client device is lost.

Test failover capability

None. The restore wizard’s “Simulate restore only” is a dry run that does not boot a machine, so there is no test failover to score.

End-to-end RTO

70, the manual band. The disk-image write to a fresh server’s disk took about two minutes, but the full procedure (rescue boot, agent install, restore-to-physical-device, network rewrite, reboot) ran 15 to 25 minutes. The recovered server matched the pre-disaster checksum and served its application at a new IP.

RPO

30. Scheduled disk-image backups with incrementals, no continuous data protection. The first live-root-volume backup filled differential storage and needed the workload to be quiesced for a clean image.

Failback and reprotect

40. Failback is the same manual restore in reverse, with no delta-sync and no automated reprotect.

Connectivity and network flexibility

10. No DR networking. The restored machine carried the source’s MAC-matched static netplan, which we rewrote by hand to the recovery host’s address before it would come up.

DR target reach

71, five of seven. Bare metal, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and Proxmox natively; AWS and Azure through VMDK and VHDX export. One caveat surfaced here: a restore-to-file image inflates to the full disk size, so the same-size source disk cannot hold the intermediate file, which forced the bare-metal restore path.

MSP360 Managed Backup

MSP360 is a backup product whose disaster recovery is a manual restore-to-VM, and whose recovery works on Windows only. On Windows it matched Comet’s recovery class and actually booted a restored server on separate hardware. Its cross-OS score is low because its Linux agent has no image backup, so half the benchmark (Linux recovery) scores zero. The sub-scores below are for Windows; the 21 cross-OS total is the Windows numbers averaged with a Linux zero.

Failover automation depth

0. No engine, no runbook, no recovery server. The “DRaaS” and “Cloud DR” on its product pages resolve to a manual restore-to-VM.

Test failover capability

40 on Windows. The Run Restore Verification feature boots the image as a Hyper-V virtual machine and checks for a successful logon, which is more than a dry run, but it needs local Hyper-V (absent on the cloud test hosts) and validates a backup rather than failing over to a recovery site.

Run Restore Verification boots the image on local Hyper-V, which the cloud test hosts cannot provide.

End-to-end RTO

70 on Windows. We restored a full-disk image with GPT-to-BIOS/MBR conversion, wrote it to a separate cloud server, booted Windows on the new host, and reached an external health probe byte-exact clean. The restore engine produced the bootable image in five to six minutes; the rest was moving the image, booting it, and a manual network fix. End to end, the bare-metal restore-to-VM was a 15-to-25-minute, multi-step manual procedure, the same class as Comet’s Linux recovery. A simpler in-place restore of just the encrypted data, with the server still running, took about 10 minutes.

RPO

30 on Windows. Scheduled image backups with changed-block-tracking incrementals, no continuous data protection.

Failback and reprotect

40 on Windows. Manual full restore back to source, no delta-sync, no automated reprotect.

Connectivity and network flexibility

10 on Windows. No DR networking. The restored server booted with the source machine’s static IP and was unreachable until we set the correct address through the out-of-band console.

DR target reach

86 on Windows, six of seven. Physical disk, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and VirtualBox, plus all three public clouds through native restore-wizard options: Restore to Amazon EC2, Restore to Azure VM, and Restore to Google Cloud Instance (image export to AWS VM Import is the indirect fallback). The native Google Cloud restore makes MSP360 the only product in the test that reaches Google Compute Engine, so on raw target count it ties Acronis and tops Comet. It misses only the vendor-managed DR cloud, which it has none of. The GPT-to-BIOS/MBR conversion that made the bare-metal restore boot on a BIOS host is a useful piece of the breadth.

The Linux gap is the decisive limitation. MSP360’s Linux agent does file-level backup only, with no disk image, so there is no bootable system image and no restore-to-VM on Linux. For an MSP with any Linux fleet, disaster recovery with MSP360 covers only half the estate.

Feature comparison

Failover and orchestration

Third-party integrations and recovery targets

Recovery reach is close across the three, but composed differently. Acronis recovers into its own cloud, Azure, on-premises VMware and Hyper-V hosts, and a customer’s AWS EC2 through a documented restore-to-EC2 migration, missing only Google Compute Engine. MSP360 has no managed cloud but supports all three public clouds natively (its restore wizard offers Restore to EC2, Azure VM, and Google Cloud Instance), making it the only product here that supports Google Compute Engine.

Comet reaches AWS and Azure by exporting a VMDK or VHDX and importing it, with no managed cloud and no Google Cloud path. Acronis and MSP360 each land at six of seven destination types and Comet at five. None ships a built-in third-party DNS failover integration such as a Cloudflare-style automatic record reroute; Acronis provides custom DNS and VPN modes, and on the manual products, the recovered machine’s network is configured by hand.

Network and failback

Disaster recovery testing findings

Network reconfiguration after a manual restore

On both manual products, the recovered server booted with the source machine’s static IP, not the recovery host’s, and was unreachable on the network until an operator fixed it. The address lives inside the disk image, so it travels with the restore. On Comet (Linux) we rewrote the netplan configuration in the rescue environment; on MSP360 (Windows) we logged into the booted server through the cloud console and set the static IP by hand. A DRaaS handles this as part of the failover; a manual restore does not.

Recovery point quality and failover reliability

Acronis failed over from a known-good backup, but a recovery point captured while a backup was still running produced a recovery server stuck in journal recovery. The automated test failover caught the same condition independently and reported it as a failure. The lesson is operational: during an incident, pause the running backup before failing over, so the recovery point is consistent.

UEFI-to-BIOS conversion on restore

The MSP360 recovery host booted in BIOS mode while the source was UEFI/GPT. MSP360’s restore includes a “Convert GPT to BIOS/MBR” option that rebuilds the partition layout and boot configuration for the BIOS target, which lets the restored Windows boot on dissimilar firmware. Without that conversion, the disk would not have been bootable on the recovery host. Comet’s restore-to-file path hit a different mechanical wall: the image inflates to the full disk size, so the bare-metal-to-target-disk path was the only one that fit.

What is the difference between backup and disaster recovery?

A backup is a copy of data you can restore. Disaster recovery is the orchestrated process of bringing a workload back into service on different infrastructure after the original is lost, measured by how fast the service returns (RTO) and how much data is lost (RPO).

The benchmark shows the gap concretely. All three products produced a correct backup and a byte-exact restore. Only one of them, Acronis, turned that backup into a running service on a fresh server with one click in 73 seconds. The other two restored the same data correctly but left the failover, the boot, and the networking to a human, which is why their recovery ran in tens of minutes and their automation dimensions scored zero. A product can be an excellent backup tool and still not be a disaster recovery tool.

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Ajouter comme source préférée

What disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) means?

Disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) means the vendor hosts the recovery environment and orchestrates the failover, so the customer recovers into managed infrastructure without building it. Acronis fits this definition: a recovery server boots in its cloud from a runbook.

Comet, MSP360, and similar backup products use “DRaaS” and “Cloud DR” on their marketing pages to describe a different thing: a manual restore of a disk image to a virtual machine or cloud instance that the customer provisions and operates. The capability is real, and the target list is broad, but the orchestration is the operator. A buyer reading “DRaaS” should check whether the product ships a failover engine (a recovery server, a runbook, a test failover) or whether “DR” is the backup product’s restore feature under a marketing label.

Disaster recovery benchmark methodology

The benchmark measures disaster recovery, not backup throughput, so every product ran the same recovery lifecycle: install the agent, take a clean image of a live server, trigger a disaster on that server, recover it to a separate machine, and verify the recovered state against a known baseline. Image-backup timings are reported as elapsed time only.

Test environment

The sources were two cloud servers, one Windows Server 2022 and one Ubuntu 24.04, each a VPS with a 75 GB disk. Recovery targets were separate cloud servers of the same class (and, for Acronis, the vendor’s own cloud).

Each source ran a deterministic workload so the recovery could be checked byte for byte. The workload was a small web service answering /health with HTTP 200, a database table of 10,000 rows with a known fixed checksum, 50 deterministic files, and a SHA-256 baseline manifest of all of them. Because the workload is identical on every run, “did the exact pre-disaster state come back” is a yes-or-no check, not a judgment call.

Disaster and recovery protocol

The disaster was a controlled, reversible ransomware simulation, not real malware. At T0 it base64-encoded the workload files into .locked copies and deleted the originals, overwrote each database row with an ENCRYPTED_BY_RANSOMWARE_SIM marker, and dropped a ransom note. The operating system stayed up by design; only the data was corrupted, so the recovery could be driven from the vendor’s recovery point rather than from a crashed host.

Recovery followed a fixed timestamp protocol:

• T0, disaster declared (the clock starts here).

• T1, operator triggers the failover (a runbook click for Acronis, the first manual restore action for the others).

• T3, the recovered VM reaches login.

• T4, the application answers (port open, health 200).

• T5, the recovered service is reachable from an external client, which is the headline business RTO: RTO = T5 – T1.

• T6, data integrity is confirmed by re-computing the SHA-256 manifest and the database checksum against the baseline and confirming no .locked files or ransom note remain.

Times come from two sources, not a stopwatch: the vendor console (the activities or job log for T1 through T4) and an external probe from a separate machine (T5).

The recovery times are reported at different precisions on purpose. Acronis recovers with a single automated runbook action, so its end-to-end time is a repeatable window; it ran two consecutive failover drills, and the table reports the average. The manual restore-to-VM recoveries (Comet and MSP360) are multi-step procedures where the operator provisions a target, restores the image, and reconfigures the network by hand, so the end-to-end time depends on the operator and is reported as a range rather than a single figure. The machine-only parts of those recoveries are precise (Comet’s disk-image write took about two minutes, and MSP360’s restore engine produced the bootable image in five to six minutes), but the full procedure is operator-bound.

Scoring methodology

Seven dimensions are scored 0 to 100 and weighted: failover automation depth (18%), test failover capability (12%), end-to-end RTO (22%), RPO (12%), failback and reprotect (10%), connectivity and network flexibility (10%), and DR target reach (16%). Each dimension is reported separately; the weighted total is informational.

Windows and Linux are scored as separate sub-scores and averaged. A product that does not support disaster recovery on one operating system scores zero on that sub-score, with the gap cited as a finding rather than left blank, which is why MSP360’s Windows-only recovery averages to roughly half of its Windows sub-score.

Capabilities that a product does not have are scored by absence and cited (for example, the lack of a failover engine in Comet and MSP360 sets their automation and test-failover dimensions to zero). “By absence” means the feature does not exist, confirmed against the product, rather than a dimension left untested.

Category scores

Scores are the average of the Windows and Linux sub-scores. Acronis and Comet support disaster recovery on both operating systems, so their average equals their per-OS score. MSP360 supports image-based recovery on Windows only, so its Linux sub-score is 0 and every dimension is halved.

The gap between Acronis and the other two is concentrated in three dimensions: failover automation (DR1), test failover (DR2), and connectivity (DR6). These are the dimensions that a DRaaS engine provides and a backup product does not. Acronis takes 38 of its 56-point lead over Comet from these three columns alone.

Target reach is not where the products separate. Acronis and MSP360 each reach six of seven destination types, and Comet five, but the sets differ: Acronis carries its managed cloud, AWS EC2 (documented restore-to-EC2 migration), Azure, on-premises hypervisors, cross-region, and cross-cloud, missing only Google Compute Engine; MSP360 has no managed cloud but reaches all three public clouds natively, AWS, Azure, and Google Compute Engine, plus on-premises hypervisors. The weakest product on automation thus matches the strongest on raw reach, which is the point: the difference that decides the benchmark is automation, not breadth.

MSP360’s halved column is an artifact of operating-system coverage, not of weaker Windows recovery. On Windows alone, MSP360 scores the same 70 on end-to-end RTO as Comet does on Linux, because both run the same class of manual restore-to-VM. The cross-OS average drops to 21 because MSP360 cannot do image-based recovery on Linux at all.

Limitations and scope

The disaster recovery side was tested on cloud virtual machines without nested virtualization, so any feature that needs a local hypervisor (MSP360’s Hyper-V restore verification, on-premises replication targets) was assessed from documentation and the product UI rather than executed. The connectivity dimension was exercised in cloud-only mode hands-on; the VPN and IPsec modes were assessed from the console and documentation.

Further reading

• Backup software benchmark: Acronis vs NinjaOne vs Comet vs MSP360
• Top 7 SaaS backup solutions
• Google Workspace backup: NinjaOne vs Acronis vs CloudAlly

Citer cette recherche

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@misc{sar2026,
  author = {Sarı, Ekrem},
  title  = {{Disaster Recovery Benchmark: Acronis vs Comet vs MSP360}},
  year   = {2026},
  month  = jul,
  howpublished    = {\url{https://aimultiple.com/disaster-recovery-solutions}},
  note   = {AIMultiple. Consulté le 2 Juillet 2026}
}

Ekrem Sarı

Chercheur en IA

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Ekrem est chercheur en IA chez AIMultiple, spécialisé dans l'automatisation intelligente, les GPU, les agents IA et les frameworks RAG.

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