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How to protect TIB files on internal drive against ransomware

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I have an additional internal 4TB HD as a destination for backups using ATI 2017.

I want to make sure those backup files are protected against encryption by a potential ransomware infection.

It seems like I could use Acronis Secure Zone, but I would lose half the space on that 4TB. I was hoping to create a 4TB partition without a drive letter (not sure that provides protection against ransomware), but it doesn't show up as a destination, seems like any destination has to have a drive letter assigned.

Any recommendations to protect those .TIB files when they're on a hard drive in the same PC?

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Jose, welcome to these User Forums.

To be honest with you, the simplest method of protecting your TIB files against ransomware would be to upgrade your ATIH 2017 to the new 2018 version which comes with Acronis Active Protection (AAP) integrated in all versions whereas this was a Premium feature with ATIH 2017 New Generation.

AAP is designed specifically to provide such protection from malware / ransomware.

See the Acronis Active Protection information on the main Acronis web site.

One disadvantage of using ASZ is that this is a FAT32 type partition and therefore limited in maximum size, especially compared to using NTFS / GPT partitioned drives which do not have limitations with current drive sizes.

With any protection scheme, you should have more than one backup destination, i.e. your internal 4TB drive plus perhaps other external drives (USB or Network) and also keep a copy of backup images stored safely offline / offsite for protection from natural disasters such as fire/flood/theft etc.

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

i noticed that new feature of the 2018 version, but I was hoping to make it work with version 2017.

It seems like a seasoned backup solution would provide some way of protecting against encryption for a 2017 version, it's not that I'm looking so far back, we're in 2017.

Yes, this is going to be 1 of several backups, by the way, an external drive would still have the same problem, since it would be under another drive letter and it would be affected by ransomware just as easy.

Jose, take a look at the document in the MVP User Tools and Tutorials repository where there is one I wrote showing how to automatically connect / disconnect an external backup drive as part of a backup task.  This was for another user also concerned with protecting against ransomware and allows the backup task to connect the drive at the start of the process then disconnect it again when done.  This will also work with internal drives.  The VBS script files for this method are also in the same repository.