Secure Zone browsing and backup identification

[JF20938]

I've created a Secure Zone on my first drive and saved a backup to it.

Now, when I go to "Explore Backup Archive", I don't get an opportunity to see the contents of the Secure Zone. I can expland "Backup locations" and I see all backups outside Secure Zone (on a second drive), but there is no reference to the Secure Zone anywhere.

The corresponding Help screen indicates that this should be possible:
To explore a backup archive:
• Select an archive or a backup location from the drives tree. If the archive is located in Acronis Secure Zone, select it to choose the archive at the next step.
Without being able to browse the Secure Zone, I can't see the date/time of the backup in there.
Interestingly, I CAN restore the backup from the Secure Zone. The "Restore Data Wizard" shows the Secure Zone under Desktop. I restored the image to the second drive, then disabled the first drive during a reboot. My PC came up just fine, but I still can't tell the date/time of the backup.

(It's probably not relevant, but I did have a Secure Zone on each drive at one point). I deleted the one on Drive 2, because when I looked at them in the "Restore Data Wizard", it wasn't easy to tell them apart >:( so I deleted the second one. Could that deletion have caused BOTH to disappear from "Explore Backup Archive" but not on "Restore Data Wizard"?)

[Xpilot]

You must have been able to confuse TI to get it to allow you to have two secure zones on your system. Only one is allowed.
Perhaps you disabled one of your drives and installed a second secure zone on the other one. As you found this is not a good idea.

I have never seen the secure zone listed in the explore backup archive tree. This may be by design or by omission. However it is not really a problem as you can see a time/date list of all the secure zone images in the mount or recover images screens. I seem to recall with only one image in the zone the time/date is not shown but as I have 10 there at the moment I am not going to check it out for you !
I use the mount facility to explore secure zone images in detail.


Xpilot

[JF20938]

It's quite possible that I created two Secure Zones that way. Thanks.

Not seeing a date/time is surely an omission. Sure, if you need to restore a few files, then mounting the image and browsing in My Computer is fair enough. But if you want to restore a complete disk, you need a date/time to know which one is the latest BEFORE your accident.

I've looked everywhere but I still can't quite believe it's impossible to determine the date/time of a backup in Secure Zone. Crazy - that must be B&R 101. Even adding columns to the dialog within "Mount Image Wizard" doesn't help - there is no option for timestamps.

Acronis?

[Xpilot]

If you open the Mount Image Wizard and select the secure zone you will get an Archive Date selection screen which lists the archives by date and time.
Exactly the same information is displayed following selection of the zone in the Recovery Data Wizard.

From my point of view there is nothing that needs to be changed by Acronis as all the information that is needed is there. This annotation of archives in the zone requires no user input as it is done automatically.

As you are not getting this result I suggest the you remove the secure zone using the manage zone wizard and start again with new images since your zone operations are currently screwed.

Xpilot

[JF20938]

Sorry for the delay in responding to your good advice.

I can now see where the dates are supposed to be, but there is none there. However, I'm happy to accept your suggestion that I confused True Image by hiding one disk from it, thereby creating two Secure Zones etc.

Actually, taking advice from other posts here, I've abandoned the idea of using a Secure Zone. I have a large second disk which I use as my backup location. Some others seem to think otherwise, but I find backups to be astonishingly fast in that configuration. [added later: ok, they take many minutes, but throwing Gigabytes from one place to another is going to take time!]

All the restore tests that I've done worked just fine too. The weakest part of the product is the Help information. There is so much that could be explained or recommended (like a standard approach to test the product), but this forum partly makes up for that.

Thanks again, John.