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Acronis Secure Zone Size Limit 2TB

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The TI 2015 manual says the ASZ is limited by the unallocated space on the selected partition. I have a 3TB disk with one partition and I am unable to create a secure larger than 2TB.

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I think this is a limitation of the FAT32 file system. It has a theoretical partition maximum size of 8TB, but with 512-byte sectors found on most hard drives, it is actually 2 TB in practice.
The Acronis secure zone is a modified FAT32 partition and has most likely the same limitation.

I use a 4TB GPT hard drive, my secure zone is limited to 2TB.

 

Damien, ASZ only uses FAT32 for the partition it creates, so it doesn't matter that your drive is a 4TB GPT one.

Personally, I do not use ASZ and just create my own NTFS partition for my backups where this issue does not come in to play to limit the partition size.

I Steve,

ASZ is limited to 2TB but this doesn't prevent me to like it for two reasons:

1. Increased security

2. it is a non-mounted volume (no need to windows scan it at "file explorer" start time).

But you are right, I just check it, the current implementations of the Fat32 are limited to 2TB (vs 16TB max theoricaly).

It's just stupid on my part to have bought a 4TB drive, but I had a good price at amazon. 

Anyways In my case 2TB are largely sufficient.
 

 

Damien, you should still be able create another 2TB partition in the unused part of  your 4TB drive if you want to do so.

I found the same problem - I have a 10 TB hard disc and was hoping to use it all for the Acronis Secure Zone.

 

All seems to go well when you're configuring it from within Acronis - it recognises the full 10 TB of the drive and appears to allow you to increase the size to make use of it.

 

But it will never in fact use more than 2 TB.

 

I have found this to be the case with all versions of Acronis Backup, including 11.7 and 12, running under every version of Windows I have tried, including Windows XP, 7 and 10.

 

I would have thought that, given the size of discs nowadays, they would have fixed this problem by now.

Chris, this limitation of 2TB is purely because the ASZ uses FAT32 as the partition type.  If Acronis switched to using NTFS (as MBR or GPT) then that limit wouldn't apply.  This is a design issue with how ASZ has been implemented.  Please submit Feedback direct to Acronis for this issue using the tool provided in the ATI GUI.

Steve,

Many thanks for your posting.

 

Can you direct me to the right tool?

 

There are several help options in the Acronis Backup GUI, but I can't seem to hit on one that suggests it is open to feedback.

 

 

Chris, I don't have or use Acronis Backup so difficult to advise where the feedback option is located.  For Acronis True Image 2018, it is behind the Help (?) icon in the GUI so perhaps a similar place in ABR?

2018-04-26 16_47_21 Feedback.png

There is also a Feedback page on the Acronis website - for me this shows as the following URL https://www.acronis.com/en-gb/support/feedback.html

Steve,

 

Thanks for that - I've used the feedback link you provided.