Back-up files disappeared from the Acronis Secure Zone in True Image Home 2011
I seem to have lost the way to use the back up located on my ASZ, and I wonder if there is any way to recover them.
After having purchased True Image Home 2011 for my 64-bit Windows 7, I created the Acronis Secure Zone and successfully performed several runs of the whole system back-up using the version chain scheme. However, at some point I could no longer create the back-up, as the process would stop with the error saying "The specified file does not exist". Visiting the ASZ with Explorer it turned out the ASZ contains no files. In the Tools and Utilities / Acronis Secure Zone I can see in the Size step that there is a portion of the ASZ occupied that would correspond to the past back-ups. This is in build 6696.
Is there some way perhaps to recover the disappeared backup files?
Here are some things that may have contributed to the issue, but I am not certain they could actually do any harm:
- I am running Diskeeper 2010 Professional for live defragmentation. I don't see ASZ in its settings, so I doubt it does anything to that area of the hard drive.
- In the beginning I used Try & Decide functionality, but it has gone wrong: when I wanted to roll back to the original state of the system, the OS would no longer boot, stuck at Starting the Acronis TrueImage. I had to use the Windows 7 recovery disk to restore the booting functionality. Later I discovered there was a fault in my motherboard's bios as it would not keep the BCD settings. The bios flash update solved this. Yet after that the ASZ still contained files.
- I use ESET SmartSecurity as antivirus and firewall.
Hello Pat L,
thank you for your suggestions. At this point I could live without the back up files in my ASZ, but I was wondering, should I have depended on them, what could I do to attempt to recover those files. Looking at past posts, I saw that there used to be some way of converting an ASZ into a normal partition and running a standard check, so I was wondering if there was some way of doing that even now.
I wanted to use ASZ for being able to roll back the system, should some program or installation cause the Windows to stop working properly (it happened already and the recovery helped). Certainly, for hardware failures, I want to keep the back up on another hard drive, internal or external.
Tej,
If you are somewhat OK with losing your backups, I suggest you take the simpler route of delete the ASZ and, if you really want to use it, recreate it.
Also, if one day you update your ATI software, I recommend you delete it after uninstalling your older version, then recreate it with your new version. It is supposed to work from one version to another, but has shown issues.