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Secure Zone Creation Time is excessive at over 1hour

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I am running a Raid0 array of 2 x 256 OCZ4 SSD's with 3 partitions, 1 runs W8 Pro and the next Windows 7 Home Premium. the 3rd is a small 10gb for secure zone so I can use startup recovery using F11 at boot time (no backups). My boot manager is Easybcd 2.2. Also managed by Easybcd is a second disc (velocity raptor) running windows XPSP3 making my system triple bootable. Even with another data disk the backup of the whole system (approx 180GB) only takes 30-40 mins to a USB3 external 2Tb drive. I use Acronis True Image 2013 with plus pack version 6514 .

I create the secure zone using the 3rd 10gb partition and use it all up.

The problem I have is in the creation time of the secure zone, it takes well over an hour. When I am trying to test use of F11 recovery, each iteration of remove secure zone, remove F11 recovery and the recreate secure zone and initiate startup recovery for F11 on boot takes far too long. As of yet I have not got startup recovery manager working. All I get on boot is ACRONIS LOADER FATAL ERROR BOOT DRIVE (partition) not found. Do I have to extract boot cd contents to secure zone and give it a boot sector, if so how ?

Any advice please, am I doing something wrong (please no treatises on why use F11 boot, I am trying it to see if it has value for me in my environment), I would be grateful for any help.

Regards

Terry Pye

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Yours is not a typical setup (RAID array, three partitions, triple boot, Easybcd boot manager, etc.) Perhaps that complicates matters for Secure Zone setup.

FYI:
I advise against creating the Acronis Secure Zone. It's really meant as a sub-optimal method of backup for people who have no external target to which to backup. If your drive fails, you would lose your system, files, and your Secure Zone backups.

It's much better and safer to make backup images to an external hard drive.

Also, in the past there were occasional reports of the Secure Zone causing problems to the system. When I installed Secure Zone on one PC, it corrupted the hard drive causing data loss and rendering the system unbootable. Perhaps the latest versions of Secure Zone are improved, but that experience coupled with its inherent insecurity and lack of redundancy cause me to be wary of Secure Zone.

I also recommend against the associated Acronis Startup Recovery Manager. If activated, it modifies your system drive Master Boot Record (MBR), which can cause problems with multi-boot managers and other low-level disk utilities.

Thanks for the reply Tutle, After several days trying to get secure zone and startup recovery manager I am inclined to agree with you. The documentation is non existent (nowhere except in these forums is there any indication that secure zone is needed for startup recovery manager. For a newby it was extremely frustrating (even as an experience systems engineer) to work out what was required. I now understand the situations in which the 2 capabilities (used loosely) are applicable. In my situation, I shall continue with my external drive recovery method.

As an aside I used the Western Digital version of secure zone for a while and was sufficiently impressed to get the full version (3 licences for my setup) and I have to say that if you keep it simple there is no real problem, however the forum tells me that it is still a very buggy system with poor documentation. A lot of work is required to bring it up to standard.

Without realising it, I had tested ATI 2013 in Virtualbox VM and got secure zone and startup recovery Manager working on F11 Boot. It looks quite good, but really only applicable in single system disk environments as I had earlier concluded. It is certainly easier to use than having to put in a CD/DVD and boot from that for recovery.

Terry Pye wrote:
It is certainly easier to use than having to put in a CD/DVD and boot from that for recovery.

I boot the Rescue Media from a USB flash drive. IMO, that's far preferable than the risks that come with the minor benefit of using F11 rather than a CD or USB flash drive.

Bingo, got both ATI secure zone and startup recovery working on my system and is goes very fast in creating the secure zone. The secret was to use the boot cd and that environment to do the set up. You have to be quick on boot to hit F11 to get startup recovery going, but it works perfectly. Secure zone is independent of startup recovery, but the two would tend to go together in a single disk system with the secure zone partition being of sufficient size to hold the system backup. It also does not affect my triple boot EasyBCD setup if I choose to ignore F11 on startup. The only thing I have not yet worked out is how some 3-400K of code get set up in the disk, I have looked at boot sectors and the disk image and have not yet worked it out. Guess I am a stuborn ----- for wanting to work it out since I will still use my current backup philosophy in place, but will probably use F11 on startup recovery should I need to recover or play with secure zone/startup recovery setup.

Regards

Terry

What are your plans for recovery when the system has a disk issue and the backups inside the secure zone is not accessible to you or anyone?

I hope you have other full, complete and current backups stored on other disks or locations--not configured as secure zones.

To GroverH

Full/incremental daily backups on 2 weekly cycle outside secure zone on removable 2tb USB3 drive are used and will boot from ATI 2013 floppy (2 copies just in case and both tested). I also have a separate disk bootable with XPSP3 that could also be used for recovery purposes (i.e. loading ATI 2013). Recovery has been tested many times in anger since as a retired systems engineer I tend to push the boundaries a bit on my own system. This secure zone and recovery system was an exercise to keep the grey matter going, I still have not worked out how and where the TI 2013 image for recovery booting on F11 is kept, if you can help I would be gratefull.

Terry,

The reboot into Linux from Windows files lurk in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Acronis folder, assuming a standard install of your OS