Informal Poll: Secure Zone or Not Secure Zone?

I thought I'd poll (informally) on this question: How many of you back up to the Secure Zone, how many of you to a regularly partitioned HD?

At this time, I am not using the Secure Zone.

Below, my Acronis-revamping of a famous shakespeare quote (who can tell from which play? )

To Secure Zone or Not to secure Zone: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler for the hard drive to suffer
the bits and bytes of outrageous loss of data
or to backup your data against a sea of data corruption
and by opposing data loss end them. To fail; to crash
No more; and by a full backup we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
that Hard drives is heir to, 'tis a consumation
Devoutly to be wish'd

 

I think it works quite well. Makes restoring from "F11" bootup very easy. I had a hard time setting up tha secure zone but that was because of my hardware configuration and partitioning strategy. Acronis was very helpful at getting it to work for me. If you want to "explore" images then thay can't be in the secure zone. I have images in as well as out of the secure zone. I'm not sure if the SZ will truly be invisible to hackers/trojans/virus but it can't hurt and makes restoring a no brainer.

 

Feddup
If you have the secure zone, but you also make backups to a regular partition if you hit F11 at bootup are you only able to restore the secure zone backup, or is the regular partition backup also available through F11?

 

Hello Jaxx and Feddup,

Thank you for your continued interest in Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

You are able to explore image both on ordinary partition and in Acronis Secure Zone. Just indicate Acronis Secure Zone instead of the image file after you launch "Explore Image" tool and you will be able to choose which image you want to explore.

After you boot your computer with the help of Acronis Startup Recovery Manager (using F11 key) you will be able to restore any image you have. This way is almost the same as booting from Acronis Bootable CD.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Ilya
i am still getting this error message when I try and create a secure zone on an external usb hd. see attached pic. Can you help?

 

You can choose where you want to restore from. It works as well from either. I've been experimenting more than I probably should and TI has been a lifesaver. I know how to clean install but i'd rather not. I really shouldn't be so trusting but once Acronis helped me get everything working right TI's never failed. The secure Zone was the most problematic to get going. After losing about two weeks work I now image before anything risky. As for imaging from or to a USB hard drive. I've seen too many issues. I own a Jetaudio (iaudio) M3 Digital Audio player (40 gb) and I've tried to image it without success. I'm not stressed about it but I might be if I'd bought an external HD for backups. I'd like to know why the USB imaging doesn't work. Although I have no idea how to do it supposedly my Hard drive based MP3 (DAP) can act as a backup device. All i can say to the people having trouble is keep up a dialogue with Acronis. I sent numerous screenshots and reports of all sorts until they figured out what i was doing wrong. I just reread ilya's post and will have to look into being able to mount and explore images in the secure zone. somehow i got the idea that it wasn't possible!

 

Happily my usb drive works fine (so long as a regular partition) and i havent had the corrupt image problem described in a current thread.

 

I always image to my 2nd physical HDD, where I also store all data. My C: has Windows and Program Files. I find this very accomodating. C: is SATA 80GB and D: is IDE 250GB. I have been using this setup (2 physical HDDs) for quite some time and it's simply great.

 

Hello Jaxx,

This message shows that you won't be able to activate Acronis Startup Recovery Manager because very few motherboards allows you to boot from USB device. Could you please send screenshots of the actions that lead to this message to support@acronis.com along with the link to this thread indicating in the subject of the letter that you want to contact Ilya Toytman. This will allow me to investigate the problem further.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Hello feddup,

The most possible reason why you cannot crea the image of your MP3 player drive is that it is recognized as removable media in Windows. This will be the same if you try to create the image of thumb drive or a floppy diskette. All these devices are removeable media and Acronis True Image is able to create images of hard disks only. It means that Windows should recognize the device as hard disk.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

If you search this forum for "secure zone" you'll find a whole catalogue of problems/disasters. In particular, activating the associated Startup Recovery Manager (the F11 during boot feature) causes Ti to modify the MBR of your system disk. This can cause serious problems with certain multi-boot managers and other software.

According to Acronis Support, the SZ was primarily intended for people without a second fixed hard drive or removable drive/media, or without the facility to boot from a rescue disk (they could press F11 during system boot instead). Personally, if you don't really need it, I would steer well clear.

Regards

 

I agree with Menorcaman 100% don't use it unless absolutely necessary. I won't touch it after some of the things I've read here!

 

Ok thanks I'm not going to use a secure zone.