This guide details the process of installing the Acronis Backup Agent on a Windows Server.
To complete the guide, you’ll need to access your server’s Desktop remotely. For this, we recommend Microsoft Remote Desktop or remote console.
If you’d like to learn how to access your server via the remote console, read the following guide:
How to access IPMI / Remote Console
Adding a Protection Plan
Before we can start, your Acronis Cyber Protect tenant requires at least ONE valid Protection Plan.
Additionally, we strongly recommend cloning and using a separate Protection Plan for each protected workload, as any changes made to a multi-use plan will affect all workloads protected by that plan.
You can find a list of Protection Plan templates at the linked page. Make sure to select a “Standard Backups” plan.
A guide showing how to import the downloaded Protection Plan file is linked below:
How to import a Protection Plan
A guide showing how to clone the imported Protection Plan can be found further down in the same guide:
Cloning a Protection PlanIf you already have a suitable Protection Plan, you may continue to the next section:
Allowing Acronis IPs into the firewall
Allowing Acronis traffic through the firewall
To set up and run Acronis backups, you need to whitelist the following outgoing TCP ports:
443
7770-7800
8443
44445
To accomplish this easily, we have created an Acronis Firewall Allow script for your convenience. This script works on Debian, Ubuntu, or any RHEL-based Linux distribution and accounts for multiple software firewall implementations: CSF, Imunify360, firewalld, UFW, and plain iptables/nftables.
You can make use of this script by running the below one-liner as root any user in the sudoers group.
( (command -v dnf && sudo dnf install -y wget) || (command -v yum && sudo yum install -y wget) || (command -v apt-get && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y wget) ) >/dev/null 2>&1 ; sudo wget -q https://salt-fileserver.servercontrol.com.au/files/acronis/acronis_firewall_allow.sh -O /root/acronis_firewall_allow.sh && sudo chmod +x /root/acronis_firewall_allow.sh && sudo bash /root/acronis_firewall_allow.shIf you ever need to revert any changes made by the script, simply execute the acronis_firewall_allow.sh file with the --revert flag.
If your SAU server is protected by a FortiGate Firewall, please refer to the below drop-down to see how to easily allow these IP addresses:
How to whitelist Acronis IPs on a FortiGate Firewall
Log into your FortiGate web UI.
Copy and paste the below code block into the FortiGate CLI.
These commands will create Acronis service object for use with a firewall policy.config firewall service custom edit "Acronis Backup Ports" set tcp-portrange 443 7770-7800 8443 44445 set comment "Required Acronis outbound TCP ports" next endIn your Firewall Policy table, create a LAN > WAN ACCEPT policy named “Acronis Backup Ports - Outgoing” that matches the below image. The “Acronis Backup Ports” service object will already exist if you ran the commands in the second step.
A written description of the policy configuration is below:
Name: Acronis Backup Ports - Outgoing
Incoming interface: vdXXXXX_lan (VLANXXXX)
Outgoing interface: vdXXXXX_wan
Source: all
Security posture tag: <Unchanged>
Destination: all
Schedule: always
Service: Acronis Backup Ports
Action: Accept
Inspection mode: Flow-based
Downloading the Agent installer
Log in to the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud portal, found here:
https://backup.aci.servercontrol.com.au/loginThe default tenant username can be found in the MySAU portal, as shown in this guide:
How to access the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud portal
Click “Devices”
Click the “Add” button in the top-right.
Under “Servers”, click “Windows” to download the Acronis Windows agent.
Once the agent executable has downloaded, access your server with RDP and upload the executable to the server by copying and pasting it in a folder.
If you have a different, preferred way to copy a file to your server, you may use that instead.
Installing and registering the Acronis agent
R1Soft Agent removal
If your server previously made use of our legacy R1Soft backup solution, you’ll need to uninstall it before installing Acronis.
Click the below drop-down to see a guide on how to complete this:
How to uninstall the R1Soft Agent
Navigate to “Programs & Features”
You can access this via Control Panel, or by entering “appwiz.cpl“ into Run or the Start Menu.Give the program list some time to load. Once completed, find “Server Backup Agent” and click it.
Click “Uninstall”.
Click “Yes”.
Wait for the uninstallation to complete.
Click “No”.
Please note that the removal of R1Soft does NOT require an immediate restart.Continue through the guide as normal.
If you don’t have R1Soft installed, continue on.
On your Windows Server, run the installer program you previously copied over.
In this example, the program was copied to Downloads.
Click “Install”
Wait for the agent to download and install.
Once the agent has installed, click “Show registration info”
Copy the registration code.
Back in your browser, navigate to Devices » Add, and scroll down on the right sidebar.
Click “Register”.
In the registration wizard, complete the following:
Paste the registration code.
Select your user. The example used here is “John Smith”.
Click “Validate code” to confirm connectivity from the server to the Acronis Cloud.
Click “Next”.
Ensure that your preferred protection plan is selected.
Leave all other plan types unselected.
Click “Next”.
Click “Register”
After a short moment, the server should appear in the list of devices. You may need to refresh the page.
Returning to your Windows Server, the installer should display the following:
Acronis agent setup is complete!
If you’d like to manually run an initial backup to test this, refer to this guide: