Acronis Home 10

I cannot create Secure Zone. Every time I perform the required reboot, Acronis starts its procedure to create the secure zone but stops with an error message "cannot re-size partition with bad blocks". I tried everything to see if indeed there are bad blocks. The hard drive comes up clean everytime. Is the Secure Zone necessary to be able to do a full restore, or am I better off backing up to another hard drive?

 

The secure zone was originally intended for computers with only one hard drive, this is less common now days. It is more sensible to place your backups on a separate hard drive. If you create a secure zone on your boot drive, usually C:\, and the drive fails you will not be able to get to the backups to restore and there is no point in creating a secure zone on separate drive.

 

You are always better off to backup to a separate hard drive. A secure zone is entirely optional. I use one all the time on a slave drive not only for the added security but for the additional automatic backup management that is available.
I am trying to remember if I actually created a secure zone when I up graded to Version 10. It is possible that my SZ is brought forward from version 9 or even version 8.
When I have time I will delete my SZ and recreate it in version 10 to see if there is really a problem there.

Xpilot

 

If you have Version 10, why are you using SZ for managing backups?

 

Because it WORKS! It adds more security than using a "bare" archive location. My backup schedule is already set up and runs without fail so I see absolutely no reason to do away with the secure zone and to use what is to my mind the inferior method of backup locations.
My backups run automatically when I am not using my computer. I think this is an ideal method of working.

But as they say each to his own

Xpilot

 

Thanks for the response's. My computer has only one hard drive. I was going to invest in an external hard drive anyway. The intent was to use the sz to be able to restore the computer if the operating system crashed and backup my stuff to another hard drive. Maybe I'll use the external to keep an image file of my entire computer instead.

 

Hello r_rod,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

The reason for the error message is that your drive contains bad blocks which prevent Acronis True Image 10.0 Home from resizing partitions to create Acronis Secure Zone. It is strongly recommended not to resize partitions with bad blocks as it may lead to a total data loss.

We would recommend you to create an image of this drive using Acronis True Image 10.0 Home and store it elsewhere, reformat the hard disk so the bad blocks are recovered and then restore the image. After that you will be able to create Acronis Secure Zone without any problem.

Acronis Secure Zone is only necessary if you want to activate Acronis Startup Rescue Manager (see chapter 3.4 "Acronis Startup Recovery Manager" of the respective User's Guide for details). Other than that, it is an optional solution for automatic management and consealed storage of archive files.

Thank you.
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Marat Setdikov