Best Practices in the Secure Zone

I'd like to bracket the matter of whether to use the Secure Zone and focus on how to use it. A recent experience tends to persuade me of its value. I had three backup archives on two partitions and on the Secure Zone, and the two others were corrupted. Limited sample size and all that, but it leads me to at least give Acronis the benefit of the doubt as to its wisdow. Failed backups happen too often. Perhaps it is often the result of corruption by other software. From one angle, it is almost self-evident, but that's not what I want to discuss.

Let's say we go with the Secure Zone as the preferred main backup location. What covers the hole in main protection when the Secure Zone becomes full and must discard the contents of an archive? When the whole archive gets trashed because there's no room to expand, you are entirely dependent on auxilliary backups during the interval between the trashing and its replacement.

What does Acronis recommend as a best practice to avoid or at least counter this vulnerability? Does Acronis recognize this problem as a defect in the current Secure Zone implementation?

 

To my knowledge the trashing of an existing archive just does not happen. If there is one image in the zone which is not large enough to take two images the original image will be preserved and the new image process will fail. The same principle applies to images with incremental or differentials.
When setting up a secure zone, preferably on a slave drive, the method I used was to decide how many complete images would suffice. My choice was a minimum of seven. In the event my slave drive can actually store ten whole images so I settled on that.
The automatic FIFO basis and simple image scheduling works like a charm.
AFAIK Chapter 3.3 of the user guide TI 9 Home covers the subject in quite a lot of detail.

Xpilot

 

Thanks. I'll read the chapter in the User's Guide.

 

Say you do an incremental backup, you get your 7 images. Then you want to get rid of the last one. Of course, you can't, because it is all one file. I guess what I'm asking is whether there's a way to start a new archive within the Secure Zone without deleting anything. Because with incremental, to delete anything is to delete everything.

My tentative conclusion here is not to do incremental backups in the Secure Zone, because it defeats FIFO. Yet I have never heard this advice clearly stated. Maybe Acronis should make differential backup default in the Secure Zone - unless I have overlooked a solution for doing incremental there without greating a "backup gap."

 

When using a secure zone the user is not expected to and cannot delete any image or part image. They are protected until they are deleted according to the secure zone FIFO rules.
For simplicity I always use whole disk images. As my zone is big enough to store the number of images I require I see no value in using incremental or differential images.
Both incrementals and differentials appear attractive in theory and do have some advantages. However differentials just keeps growing in size until they becomes unwieldy and incrementals can, following some normal housekeeping routines, be as large as a whole image. They are not really appropriate for secure zone use IMHO as the only management possible is to top them off with a new base image before the zone gets too full.

Xpilot