Secure zone?

Hi
Is a Secure Zone needed on a external drive that is just for backups?
Thanks
MachineGun

 

It is not recommended that the SZ be placed on an external drive.

It is not recommended that you use the SZ unless you have no other choice. It's better to save backups to a drive or folder or backup location if possible.

 

Thanks
MachineGun

 

I have read several posts that discourage the use of "Secure Zone" yet the operating manual praises it. On first look, the Secure Zone and the "snap restore" recovery function look quite helpful. None of the posts that belittled use of the Secure Zone gave a reason for not using it.

What seems to be the problem with Secure Zone? What is the problem if the Secure Zone and snap restoration are used together?

 

I use and contine to use the secure zone and its simplicity,security and convenience suit me well.

However some of its features do not match many other users needs.
1. It has automatic FIFO management of backup images. No manual intervention is allowed.
2. An image has to be mounted as a virtual drive to explore, copy from, or make amendments to it. The latter are actually done in the form of an incremantal so the original image is not changed.
2a. Complete images cannot be copied out of the zone to other media.
3. Acronis suggest that the Zone should be on the one and only drive that a computer has. That is OK providing that the drive does not completly breakdown, because then you would have nothing to recover from. It is better to have it on a slave drive or even on an external drive but in this case DO NOT ACTIVATE the start up recovery manager.
4. The SRM modifies the computers MBR when it is activated. This can be a problem with some installations and WILL be a problem if the secure zone is not present on a working drive at boot time.
The overwhelming view of contributors here and including myself is NOT to activate the SRM.
It actually offers very little to the computing experience and routine restores can be started from within Windows while emergencies are dealt with by using the recovery CD.
5. While snap restore may load the OS more quickly than a normal restore but it has been reported that it runs on in the background for far longer than a normal restore. The consequence can be to slow everthing up till it has finished. I believe that a snap restore will delete the whole of the target drive contents so make sure that it is only used with a whole backup image.
As you will have gathered I have never used it myself and never will.

HTH

Xpilot

 

You can get automated backup file management using ATI 10 Backup Locations and don't need to use the Secure Zone, which sets up a special hidden partition on your hard drive. A few have had some probs with Backup Locations but more have had probs, and more serious probs, with Secure Zone.

SZ was originally intended as a place to save backups if you only had one disk-- i.e., it allowed you to save a system disk/partition even if you had not other disk. Of course, if yuou only have one disk, that's better than nothing, but not by much -- if the hard drive fails, you can't access your backups to restore the image of the failed drive onto a replacement drive.

 

Well, clearly, I'd benefit from spending more time here.

Uhh .. mine was, for a long time. I was using SZ on an external USB drive until recently adding two additional internals (now three total), whereupon I moved SZ to one of the new internal drives, still not the system drive.

Good grief!! And, all this time I thought SZ was "the" preferred, optimum, choice for all backups. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the v10 docs, which accompany my Acronis, hold SZ in much higher regard!

Gadzooks!!! Well, though not on an external any longer .. I've had SRM activated since install!

So, I'm using SRM and my MBR has been modified .. can I now reverse both and get back to square-one? I don't need to use SZ at all .. I've lots of other options for backup.

 

If you have other places where you can store backup images it makes sense to keep them on a drive which does not contain any of the systems or data that you are protecting. This applies whether you are using a secure zone or not.

To remove the secure zone and to get the MBR back to normal just use the manage secure zone wizard to remove the zone. It is just a bit more tedious if the secure zone drive is broken as then the MBR would have to be repaired.

Just wait for version 11. Acronis have come up with even more exotic uses and, to my mind, worthless uses for the secure zone.

Xpilot

 

Thanks for the quick reply and info, Xpilot.

 

An additional question, please.

As I'm not going to utilize 10's SRM any longer .. I've used it's "Build Bootable Rescue Media", burning to DVD.

Is this sufficient? Need I also, or instead of, assemble the required files to create a BartPE disk? Will Bart enable more restore options/capabilities than the Acronis "rescue media"?

Thanks.

 

As long as the Rescue CD can "see" the stored images it will work. If the restores are a bit slow or if the backup media is not seen that is the time to build a Bart PE with TI plugin CD.

A Bart PE CD can be used for a wide variety of purposes other than restoring backup images. It is your choice.
The reason I originally built a Bart PE CD with TI was to speed up the restore process from USB drives.

Xpilot