Acronis Secure Zone

After using the recovery manager (F11 at startup) a few times with no problems, and restoring an image from the secure zone, It got me thinking.

How secure is the zone?

I know that i should make other back up such a on cd/dvd etc,

but how secure is the logical drive?,

Can the image be courrpted by defragers, etc?

Thanks in advance

Yours

Daryl Do

 

The secure zone is a separate disk partition that is hidden from Windows and not readable directly by Windows. That means your defragger will not touch it and most viruses, worms or trojans will also not even know it is there. So the secure zone is great for easily backing up and restoring your hard disk and individual partitions.

HOWEVER, if your hard drive crashes or if the MBR (master boot record) and partition table get trashed the secure zone is gone and will not be usable even by the recovery system or an Acronis TI boot CD. If your computer is stolen or damaged (inclement weather, fire, etc.) the secure zone will not help you.

The best plan is to have a backup of your system on CD or DVD and keep it off site (at the home of a friend or at your office, etc.). These backups should be fairly recent - every month or two - though not as frequent as your secure zone backups unless your data is super critical to you or your business.

One problem with the secure zone not being accessible is that if you want to back up to a DVD you must create a writable DVD that TI will recognize or you must create a separte partition to keep your backup so that it can then be written to DVD. Having both a secure zone and a separate Windows accessible backup partition can take a lot of disk space if you have a lot of data to backup.

 

Thanks you very much Drac for such a detailled response, this has certainly cleared up any questions I had regarding the software. I will keep in mind what your have said and will Make another back up by use of other means.

 

Hello daryldo,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that Acronis Secure Zone can not be accessed by any other applications or programs except Acronis True Image 8.0.

Acronis Secure Zone is safe enough to protect your images from almost any software-level influences. It can not protect your images only in case of the physical damage of your hard drive.

However, for the complete security I recommend you to store your images on any type of the supported removable media.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Thanks for the help and advice chaps,

 

I have a question related to Acronis Secure Zone - I can't resize it. Each time I schedule it to be resized at boot time, it freezes and data centre staff needs to reboot my server. They say there are errors on the screen related to filesystem. So I run chkdsk /F and tried again - same result.
Is there a way to make it not stop at those errors, just log them, skip resize and boot windows? That's the way I'd expect it to work on remotedly controlled server...
Regards, Chris.

 

Another question about the creation of the Secure Zone:

I have a a 30gb harddisk partitioned 15gb for normal backups located at the beginning, and 15gb for linux (3 partitions: root, swap, /home), when I tried to create the secure zone, TI had a 6 steps operation which included moving all linux partitions then creating the secure zone, can't i just create the secure zone in-place?

also putting the secure zone in an unpartitioned area, but TI didn't enable that area to be used...

 

Hello schriss,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please try to issue the command

chkdsk [drive letter]: /r

If the problem persists please create Acronis Report in the way described at Acronis Help Post and send it to support@acronis.com along with the description of the problem. We will try to help you.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Hello ramik,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Acronis Secure Zone is created in the end of the hard drive, that is why it needs to move all the partitions from the end of the hard drive if you choose to take place from the partition out of the middle of the disk. As for utilizing unallocated space, if you don't select any partitions Acronis True Image will search for unallocated space and will use it to create Acronis Secure Zone.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman