Acronis Secure Zone is Corrupt!

I've run into a bit of a HUGE problem in that it appears that my Acronis Secure Zone is corrupt! This AM I had my primary HDD die on me, but since I had been making religious nightly backups to a secondary HDD that was a 100% "Acronis Secure Zone" I wasn't in the least bit worried about losing the drive. Furthermore, after every single nightly backup, I had on verification and every AM I'd verify that the backup verification completed successfully. Apparently I had a LOT to worry about as after I installed a new primary HDD and attempted to restore my data from my "Acronis Secure Zone", True Image 9.0 Home, build 3567 kept telling me that "E0004000D: The file is corrupted".

I first ran into this when just booting from the Recovery CD, but I just wrote this off as being a problem w/ the Recovery CD. (After all, the recovery CD didn't work with my Microsoft USB Wireless mouse, so hey... just another bug, right? Yes, even tried turning off acpi and apic as well as usbmouse to no avail. But that's another less important issue.) Sooo... I re-installed a base XP Pro OS to my primary drive and installed the full version of True Image 9.0 Home, build 3567 and tried the recovery from there. No luck. I ran into the exact same problems there. I have close to 30 nights of backups in my "Acronis Secure Zone" -- it lists every single one of them -- I just can't restore from ANY of them. My backup strategy was that every Monday night a full backup was created and every T - Su an incremental was created. I figured that was "safest" as I'd surely have enough complete backups to fall back on even if the latest and greatest backup didn't work out.

So... here I am just sitting at a screen showing all my backups in the "Acronis Secure Zone" not able to restore a single one of them. Close to 100GB of data that I desperately need back that I can't restore a single byte from. This sucks. Big time. I've already sent in a formal Technical Support request but I figured I'd post this in hopes that someone out there might have some suggestions on what to do from here. As always, any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

-Jeff

About the Drive 1: This is an internal drive connected as a slave to my primary on IDE channel 1. It's been formatted as 100% Acronis Secure Zone. I've also run a complete drive fitness test on this drive to rule out any problems with it - it checks out 100% fine. Furthermore, I've tried taking this drive and putting it in an external USB/Firewire 400 enclosure and both restoring from it and running diagnostics on it. Same results. Running a "Validate Backup Archive" fails stating that the image is corrupt. Ugh.

 

Is it possible that in installing your new drive, you loosened the cable to the secondary drive? If your drives are IDE, are you sure you set the jumper correctly on the new drive? This can (unintuitively) interfere with the secondary drive.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, but that's definitely not it. I've got both drives on CSEL and a firm connection to the IDE connectors. Furthermore, I took the secondary drive out (my acronis secure zone drive) and put it in an external USB/Firewire 400 enclosure and had the exact same problems.

 

Hello carpediem91,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please let me know your Acronis request # which was sent to you in autoreply to your letter? I will find out how the investigation of your issue is going.

Thank you.
--
Tatyana Tsyngaeva

 

Tatyana,

Thanks for your help on this issue. My Acronis Request# is 552671.

 

Tatyana,

Any update on the issue? I'm desperate to get my data back and have still had no luck. Thanks in advance for your help!

 

Hello carpediem91,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

As I can see, Max Malushko has requested Acronis report. Please follow the instructions in Acronis Help Post to create it. This report would provide the detailed information on the hard disk partition structure and help to investigate the problem.

Thank you.
--
Tatyana Tsyngaeva

 

Well, so after anxiously and patiently waiting for 4 days now for a response back from Acronis' technical support team after sending them all the reports that they asked for I finally heard something back today:

"The report file shown that your Acronis Secure Zone contains errors. So, in order to solve the issue you should delete the current Acronis Secure Zone and create a mew one."

No offense to Acronis, but "Duh!" That's what I submitted the friggin' technical support request for!!! I didn't want a confirmation that my Secure Zone was corrupt (I kinda figured that one out on my own!!!)... I wanted a way to retrieve my precious data that was stored in it! Anything... just some glimmer of hope -- not to be told "yup... it's corrupt. Delete it and re-create it". I don't care about the Secure Zone itself... I care about the data IN it.

I simply cannot understand why that if I ran a verification after each and every single backup job, how I am now left with an entire corrupt Secure Zone that I am unable to get a single byte of backup data from?!!! What's the point of verifying the backup if it really ISN'T a good backup that you can restore data from?!!! I am just at a total loss on this one. If all your verified backups in your "Secure" zone can in fact not be restorable, how on Earth is this any sort of respectable backup product? Furthermore, how can this be dubbed a "Secure" zone?!!!

After reading through a number of other posts on this forum, I've tried booting from a Knoppix CD to see what exactly was in the remnants of my "Secure" zone. To my surprise, I've found a number of .tib files -- many of which appear to have quite a bit of data in them (4GB in size!). Unfortunately, I also see a lot of files that are 0 bytes in size. I've copied all the .tib files out to another fat32 partition that I could access from Windows and I tried mounting them w/ True Image but True Image keeps wanting volume 1 of the set. I'm guessing that by looking at the files that are 0 in size, those must have been my volume 1's.

What my question is now... is there ANY way to extract ANY data from these files?! I don't care about getting every single bit of data back (although that IS what I'd EXPECT from a backup program) but at this point, I'd be happy to just get back ANYTHING. I don't care how "hard" or technical the procedure would be I'm just looking for some hope of getting anything back out of these files. Thanks in advance for any help.

BTW... here's a dir of all the files in my Secure Zone:

04/20/2006 01:09 PM <DIR> .
04/20/2006 01:09 PM <DIR> ..
03/27/2006 04:59 PM 0 AAH1.TIB
03/27/2006 06:35 PM 0 AAH10.TIB
03/27/2006 06:46 PM 0 AAH11.TIB
03/27/2006 06:46 PM 182,384,526 AAH12.TIB
03/28/2006 04:23 PM 545,542,225 AAH13.TIB
03/29/2006 04:24 PM 985,515,008 AAH14.TIB
03/30/2006 04:23 PM 711,970,111 AAH15.TIB
03/31/2006 02:24 PM 713,879,105 AAH16.TIB
03/31/2006 04:20 PM 54,650,863 AAH17.TIB
04/01/2006 04:22 PM 1,180,539,593 AAH18.TIB
04/02/2006 04:21 PM 420,807,260 AAH19.TIB
03/27/2006 05:11 PM 0 AAH2.TIB
03/27/2006 05:21 PM 0 AAH3.TIB
03/27/2006 05:32 PM 0 AAH4.TIB
03/27/2006 05:42 PM 0 AAH5.TIB
03/27/2006 05:53 PM 0 AAH6.TIB
03/27/2006 06:03 PM 0 AAH7.TIB
03/27/2006 06:14 PM 0 AAH8.TIB
03/27/2006 06:26 PM 0 AAH9.TIB
04/03/2006 04:12 PM 0 AAI1.TIB
04/03/2006 05:37 PM 4,045,897,728 AAI10.TIB
04/03/2006 05:46 PM 0 AAI11.TIB
04/03/2006 05:48 PM 792,294,047 AAI12.TIB
04/04/2006 04:21 PM 796,847,066 AAI13.TIB
04/05/2006 04:21 PM 611,929,851 AAI14.TIB
04/06/2006 04:21 PM 660,477,533 AAI15.TIB
04/03/2006 04:23 PM 0 AAI2.TIB
04/03/2006 04:32 PM 0 AAI3.TIB
04/03/2006 04:41 PM 0 AAI4.TIB
04/03/2006 04:51 PM 0 AAI5.TIB
04/03/2006 05:00 PM 0 AAI6.TIB
04/03/2006 05:09 PM 0 AAI7.TIB
04/03/2006 05:19 PM 0 AAI8.TIB
04/03/2006 05:28 PM 0 AAI9.TIB
04/12/2006 01:39 PM 0 AAJ1.TIB
04/12/2006 03:04 PM 0 AAJ10.TIB
04/12/2006 03:13 PM 0 AAJ11.TIB
04/12/2006 03:15 PM 1,047,842,657 AAJ12.TIB
04/12/2006 04:46 PM 102,332,540 AAJ13.TIB
04/13/2006 04:31 PM 869,241,448 AAJ14.TIB
04/14/2006 04:22 PM 941,782,643 AAJ15.TIB
04/15/2006 04:03 PM 689,426,298 AAJ16.TIB
04/16/2006 04:01 PM 209,012,249 AAJ17.TIB
04/12/2006 01:49 PM 0 AAJ2.TIB
04/12/2006 01:59 PM 0 AAJ3.TIB
04/12/2006 02:09 PM 0 AAJ4.TIB
04/12/2006 02:19 PM 0 AAJ5.TIB
04/12/2006 02:28 PM 0 AAJ6.TIB
04/12/2006 02:38 PM 0 AAJ7.TIB
04/12/2006 02:46 PM 0 AAJ8.TIB
04/12/2006 02:55 PM 0 AAJ9.TIB
04/17/2006 04:17 PM 0 AAK1.TIB
04/17/2006 05:43 PM 0 AAK10.TIB
04/17/2006 05:52 PM 0 AAK11.TIB
04/17/2006 06:01 PM 0 AAK12.TIB
04/17/2006 06:03 PM 1,068,894,656 AAK13.TIB
04/18/2006 02:43 PM 1,079,666,130 AAK14.TIB
04/19/2006 05:44 AM 668,898,733 AAK15.TIB
04/17/2006 04:32 PM 0 AAK2.TIB
04/17/2006 04:45 PM 0 AAK3.TIB
04/17/2006 04:46 PM 386,203,648 AAK4.TIB
04/17/2006 04:56 PM 0 AAK5.TIB
04/17/2006 05:05 PM 0 AAK6.TIB
04/17/2006 05:15 PM 0 AAK7.TIB
04/17/2006 05:24 PM 0 AAK8.TIB
04/17/2006 05:33 PM 0 AAK9.TIB
04/20/2006 12:40 PM <DIR> f11
04/19/2006 09:27 AM 22,528 f11.sys
03/31/2006 03:58 AM 51,752,043 FAAA.TIB
03/20/2006 08:12 PM 4,294,966,784 xAG10.TIB
03/20/2006 08:21 PM 4,294,966,784 xAG11.TIB
03/20/2006 08:30 PM 4,294,966,784 xAG12.TIB
03/20/2006 08:38 PM 4,294,966,784 xAG13.TIB
03/20/2006 08:47 PM 4,294,966,784 xAG14.TIB
03/20/2006 08:56 PM 4,294,966,784 xAG15.TIB
03/20/2006 08:56 PM 397,236,521 xAG16.TIB
03/21/2006 04:31 PM 1,348,513,105 xAG17.TIB
03/22/2006 04:28 PM 726,061,666 xAG18.TIB
03/23/2006 04:28 PM 2,205,483,008 xAG19.TIB
03/20/2006 07:46 PM 4,294,966,784 xAG7.TIB
03/20/2006 07:54 PM 4,294,966,784 xAG8.TIB
03/20/2006 08:03 PM 4,294,966,784 xAG9.TIB

 

Well, sorry about your dilemma, but I hope others would read about it and NOT use the SZ "feature". Several of us here do not. It is just another thing in TI that can go wrong and its use is totally unnecessary these days. It was a great idea when most systems had only one drive and the cost of hard drives was prohibitive.

BTW, NOTHING on a hard drive is "secure". Everyone who has data that they consider important should keep AT LEAST two backups on different drives/media. And of course, for businesses, one copy should be kept off site.

I hope you don't take long to recover.

 

I'm not trying to 'bump' this thread but I was wondering whether you have had any success in recovering your data?

It is certainly a catasrophic loss to lose your valuable data.

 

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