Acronis Secure Zone

[Teunis]

After having read all your comments on Acronis True Image I decided to buy 9.0 Home version recently and was lucky enough to get an upgrade to 10.0 However the Acronis Secure Zone is not clear to me. I make full backups of My Computer (i.e. all files on the 2 partitions of my laptop drive) to an external USB connected drive. Those backups are in the order of 40 GB. I also created a ASZ on the laptop HD itself, under the impression that some important files are kept there which allow you to connect to the external drive in case I cannot startup the laptop normally. Of course I did activate the Startup Recovery Manager which uses the files in the ASZ. This ASZ area is relatively small, about 40 MB on my Laptop.

1) Have I understood and done this correctly?
2) Defrag and the tib files. I do the full backups after defragging both the laptop's HD and the external target HD to minimise the risk of having fragmented TIB files. When I did not, the first time I used ATI, the TIB file had 148 fragment and even after 48 hrs of defrag with PowerDefrag it was not finished defragging, so I stopped. However, even by defragging first, the target TIB still has 4 frgaments while there is still more than 100 GB of the 250 GB external HD available. Is this normal?

Teunis

[bigaldoc]

I don't use the secure zone and there at least one thread where it's talked about: <post:=520,348>post 520,348</post:>

As said by others, it looks like a way to "protect" backup images if you only have one hard drive, but the primary thing that would worry me is if the drive failed, not only is your system gone, but also the backup images as well. I do think with the use of additional drives, internal or external, the secure zone is an unnecessary "feature." (in my opinion only, of course)

[Teunis]

Big Al,

You are right I don't need it. The Wilders forum says the same thing. Thanks.

Teun

[Teunis]

However,

One needs the minimum size ASZ (about 39MB) to use the Acronis Start Up Recovery Manager (activated by pressing F11 during bootup to bypass the OS in case something goes wrong). So I have decided to leave ASZ minimum on the laptop HD only to be used in conjunction with ASURM, and do the backups to the external drive.

Teunis

[viking33]

Teunis,

Big Al has pretty much "nailed" it in his opinion of Secure Zone.

I don't use now at all but did try it way back in an earlier version ( V7 maybe? ) and finally decided that it wasn't worth keeping around, particularly since I use a separate HD to make my Images on.
I also seem to remember that it was a "dog" to get rid of when I decided to do so.

Some, maybe all, defraggers will sometimes still leave a few bits and pieces around after a defrag session. I have run defrag twice at times, when I didn't like the results of the first session.

[Teunis]

Viking,

Thanks for confirming Big Al and the remarks on defrag. As I said, I keep the minimum ASZ to be able to use the Recovery Start Up Manager. I do not save any backups in the ASZ. By the way, it is very simple in version 10 to get rid of ASZ.

Teunis

[bigaldoc]

I would also like to add this question and/or confusion on MY part. I have been thinking that the so-called secure zone and startup recovery manager are hand-and-glove subsets of the program. Therefore, if one is NOT goint to use the secure zone, the startup recovery manager wouldn't be (isn't) necessary or pertinent either. It seems to me, and is the only way I've used TI, if you create a bootable CD when you install the program, that should be the only thing needed to do a system restore in the event of a failure. Booting my system from the Acronis bootable CD recognizes my external USB hard drives.

BTW, there has been somewhat of an "issue" with TI and a wireless USB mouse and you might want to keep <post:=576,852>post 576,852</post:> in mind just in case you're in this group. I'll be sure to check Version 10 when I buy it to see if Acronis has "fixed" this slight anomoly.

[Teunis]

Big Al,

I got rid of ASZ and just like everybody else prepared a bootable CD. I had not realised it was so simple. Thanks again.

Teun

[viking33]

Al,
I don't recall seeing anything about a problem with wireless devices in the V 10 beta forums, so maybe they have fixed it if it was a problem in V 9.
I don't use any wireless devices, so I can't say from any experience, one way or the other.

[bigaldoc]

We'll see. Since it wasn't a show-stopper and the workaround did as it was supposed to, I haven't concerned myself with it since then. The thing I thought was strange about it was that my wireless keyboard worked just fine - it was just the mouse. And the mouse would move the pointer vertically but not horizontally. Not knowing anything about USB "engineering" I figured it might be due to the fact that both the mouse and keyboard are "driven" through one transmit-receive device. The reason I thought so was that the additional workaround of plugging a wired USB mouse separately into a front port on the machine also worked OK.