Why do I need Acronis Secure Zone with Recovery Manager?

I recently acquired TI Home 10 and so far I think it is excellent. I have a question about Recovery Manager & Secure Zone.

If I have a second disk (internal or external) then I would would probably choose to create my backup on that disk rather than on my system disk. Right?

If this is the case then I don't need a secure zone but I still want to use recovery manager for distaster boot up scenarios. The problem is that TI doesn't allow you to activate Recovery Manager without a secure zone. So what should I do? Create a secure zone but just don't use it? How much space should I allocate if I do this - 0mb? Its not a major issue just looking for best practice advice.

The other question I have is about hot backups. I assume the safest way to perform system disk backups is through Recovery Manager rather than through full windows GUI? Is this a fair statement?

Thanks.

 

What you need is to create the Acronis recovery CD. This is what you need to boot from in the case of a HD breakdown or for that matter any recovery process.
I have never used the recovery manager it is IMHO a waste of space and will not work in all circumstaces whereas the recovery CD will.

Backing up hot from within Windows is how TI is designed to work. There are a couple of other background backup programs which can cause conflicts but once you have TI you won't need those.

Xpilot

 

Fair point, I've got bootable media too and concluded having both is probably more convenient (not by much I grant you). I just wondered what the best practice for using recovery manager is if I have a second disk.

Re hotbackups I am concerned about one application only and thats Oracle. In my experience backing up open database files is not good practice.

Thanks.

 

I have not run Oracle and TI at the same time so cannot advise from experience. I do remember seeing a reference that TI could trip up over some data base functions. However If you were to suspend Oracle while TI took its snapshot before writing the backup and then restarting it there may be no problems. The actual snapshot only takes a few seconds after starting TI's backup. Hopefully someone who has actually done this will chip in.

For convenience and to avoid any possible conflicts I schedule my backup images to run while I am having lunch .

Xpilot

 

Hello penningt,

In order to activate the Startup Recovery Manager (SRM) TI first needs to create an Acronis Secure Zone (SZ). Whilst you can choose which drive the SZ is created on, activating the SRM will always modify the main system disk's Master Boot Record in order to invoke TI's "boot into recovery mode via F11" functionality. That functionality will be inaccessible if the modified MBR became corrupted or the hard drive died .

The SZ and associated SRM are really intended for those folks with ultra portable laptops that only contain a single HD and no CD. That way they can backup their system to the SZ and restore it by booting into the Linux based recovery environment via the F11 key. Obviously the same limitations mentioned above still apply.

Regards