Do I need to bother creating the secure zone partition?

I am an XP Home user with Acronis TI 9. If my only goal is to save an image copy of the hard drive to CD-R do I need to bother creating the Acronis Secure Zone partition? (what does that do for me?) When I run the create function, it wants to consume half my drive capacity.

Thanks.

 

No, not as long as you have another logical drive or physical drive available. Acronis TI isn't made to save to DVD directly though AFAIK.

I don't create the secure zone I just save the image to another drive and then I will burn a copy from there onto DVD using Nero.

 

My personal preference is to NOT use the SZ feature. What if your entire HD goes south! I like to save my images on to an external usb hard drive. Even CD media, and for that matter, DVD media, does not have enough capacity and would be more cumbersome for saving the images. Large hard drive are low enough in cost to make them, for me, the preferred way of saving images.

 

Hi Jayea,

If you are burning the image to CD-R or an external hard drive, it's hard to see what the Secure Zone can add.

As I understand its purpose, it's a zone which is not affected by DOS or Windows commands, and this protects against an intruder which tries to wipe out your files. Once you've got your image on an external medium, no intruder can reach it anyway, so you don't need this protection.

It's a pain to use the Secure Zone because an image you've burned into it can't be copied onto another drive or a CD-R. Likewise, if you've burned an image onto an external hard drive or onto CD-Rs, you can't copy it into the Secure Zone.

By the way, Acronis itself warns against using the Secure Zone on an external hard drive.

 

Thanks for the info. I already sqandered a quarter of my hard drive on a SZ. Oooops.

Any of your know why TI9 is not allowing me to create a second image copy of my hard drive to CD-R? First time it worked fine. Trying to put a second copy in a fire-proof box, but the second image copy is always cancelled by TI9 after the first CD is burned.

 

I use the SZ on a second internal drive. This fulfills my requirements perfectly. Automatic backups can be scheduled and when the zone fills up the oldest images are automatically deleted. All I have to do from time to time is to look at the TI logs to make sure that all is going to plan.
PS. as a pessimist I also make images to an external USB2 drive!

Xpilot

 

Thanks everyone for the information. As a result:
I deinstalled the SZ (reclaimed 10gb)
I uninstalled TI9
I downloaded TI9 2323
Reinstalled TI9 2323

Updated version seems to work fine.

 

For those of you that wish to use the Secure Zone's (SZ) functionality to automatically manage the number of images created, it's worth pointing out that you can create and use a SZ on an external HD. Just DON'T accept the default option to also activate the Startup Recovery Manager (SRM). Activating the SRM modifies the MBR, which amongst other things causes TI to look for the SZ when booting your system. If the external HD happens to be disconnected or switched off during the boot process the system will hang.

Regards