Trial - Errors - How to Manage Secure Zone?

Acronis Trie Image 8:

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the Trial Version. I suspect I’ll buy it. I’ve made 2 successful (verified) burns of my c drive. If the restores work then that will be the real test. I’m also impressed with the disaster recovery options: boot to F11 on hard drive, or to CD Rom, or to diskettes. I’m using all three. Better be safe than sorry. For some reason I’ve not yet reasoned out my boot cd didn’t want to work. The computer didn’t see it in the cd drive and just booted to the HD. I’ll have to check my bios settings, but I thought they were set for A, D (cdrom) and C: hard drive.

Several error messages trying to burn a backup to external usb2 dvd writer. Sent error messages to MS, and are in dump file. Would you like them?

I’ve been having some problems imaging to a Lite-on external usb2 dvd (832s). I can copy small image files ok, but can’t do a backup directly to it. I was trying with blank dvd-rw media, but that seems not to be what is called for. I’ll try formatting with INCD and see what happens. Actually that seems to be working now, or is at least starting.

I’m also wondering about managing an Acronis Secure Zone. I’ve created a backup image there in a 2nd volume, 2nd partition named E. I want to move the secure zone to my volume 1 (C) along with the backup image. How do I do that? I can’t find the image to move it first, and then recreate the secure zone, and I can’t create another secure zone. I also don’t want to delete the images by deleting the Secure Zone, or will it do that?

Anyhow, I’m building a new computer and want to get my old one saved before setting up the new one, and that should be later today, hopefully, with a little help from my friends.

Onebyte

 

To respond to a couple of your items:
My company uses this product extensively, installing it on our own units, and on many client's machines. Overall, our experience with this product is excellent.

(1) Image destination: the failures we have had have pretty much involved tasks where we were imaging to a CD-RW or DVD-RW drive, either internal or external. It seems that this technique is marginal compared to using a hard drive or network share as the target for the image. We have had good success using external USB hard drives, although this is subject to low performance if the machine/Bios are too old. On current hardware with USB 2.0, this gives great imaging performance.

(2) Secure Zone: Don't send an image there that you want to manage (i.e. copy, burn to CD/DVD, rename, delete, etc.). This partition is intentionally created with a special partition type code (not known to Windows) so it won't be recognized except by TI. This is so that viruses/malware will have a much harder time to discover files stored there, limiting their opportunity to corrupt your backup. We have taken to setting up both a visible imaging partition and a secure zone. The only way I know that you can delete an image in the SecureZone is to remove and re-create the SecureZone. Fortunately, this is a quick operation.

Hope this helps.
ARB

 

Thanks Alan, I'm beginning to think this Acronis True Image is the best thing to happen since the invention of indoor plumbing. The only real fault I've found so far is that the manual could be much better written, expecially in describing what the secure zone does and doesn't do, and what you can and can't do with the images you save there.

I found out the hard way that the only way that you cant' move or copy images made there, like to a dvd or cd drive, for instance. That info should be made clear in the manual.

I also couldn't figure out how to move the image and its contents to another hard drive, because I wanted to remove the one it was on from the computer. After deleting the existing image and recreating another one on another hard drive, I also found out that deleted the images stored there also.

So I'm making another set of cd and dvd sized images to transfer to removable media for safekeeping and had to store them in a visible partition.

Now I'm wondering if I have to create another image for my new secure zone, or if I can just move the ones I have already made to the new secure zone.

There is a lot of information that is not on the manual, and shoould be.

As for how to avoid the crashes and error messages when writing to cd or dvd media (with my external usb2 drive) all I had to figure out was to quick format the disk with InCD, and wait the few minutes after the format before removing it from the drive. I was the blank media that the instructions said to put in the drive that was causing the problem. Again, this is a language or communication problem, rather than a fault in the technology, which I am rapidly coming to admire.

I would have preferred to have an Acronis techie explain all this to me, but I thank you for taking your time to do so. Although I am sympathetic to the wide range of hard and softare problems in the hands of inexperienced users, I do think they could do a better job of responding to issues on the forum. I haven't tried any other form of support, but I suspect language problems may be an issue there too.

All in all, this seems to be a product I've wanted for about 20 years.

Ghost is Toast!!

Onebyte