first time acronis 11 user with a few questions.

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Beginner
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Good morning folks,

I made a secure zone on a HD on my home made new computer that does not have the OS on it.

What I have is the OS on a ssd 120gb and two other drives.

I have a 1 tb and a 500gb drive

I put the secure zone and back up in the 500 gb hd

question 1: in the event of a boot failure or system crash needed complete recovery will the acronis software recognize the other 2 nonOS drives? I ask this since with my last complete computer crash needing fresh install I had to go to disk partitioner to even activate and turn on, if you will, the other 2 non OS drives. Meaning will Acronis even be able to recognize the HD to get into the secure zone to recover? Should I use an external HD for backup? without or without secure zone?

question 2: will a 500 gb drive be able to compress about 1,120 gb of data?

Thanks in advance.

sam 30/04/2011 - 12:22
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truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
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Acronis should be able to see all the disks on your PC. If you need to recover because of a disk crash you will boot up the TI rescue CD, select the archive and restore it. It is easy to test if this is working. Boot up the CD, locate an archive in the Secure Zone or elsewhere and validate it. This not only tests that you can see the drives but that you can locate and read an archive into RAM and successfully reconstruct the numerous checksums.

Note that the absolute best way to test your backup is to restore it to a spare HD as if your HD had failed. A spare HD is recommended in case the restore fails for some reason which would leave you with unallocated space in place of your original partition - one of the first things TI does when restoring a partition is delete the existing partition on the target device.

A Secure Zone (SZ) is not essential for the operation of True Image, you can save an archive on any drive/partition other than the one being backed up. The original intent for the SZ was to allow users to easily make a second partition on a PC that had only 1 disk with 1 partition on it. It is secure only in the sense that it is not accessible by normal means.

The safest place to store an archive is on a removable drive such as an external USB. This way you can take the drive and keep it separate from the PC and be protected from a catastrophe such as a lightning strike power surge that destroys the PC. My personal preference is to write the archive to a second internal HD which is the fastest method and then copy selected archives to an external HD for a second level backup. I don't copy every archive to the external. I don't use the Secure Zone anywhere.

If you compress a typical C drive which has not too many jpg, mpg, zip, MP3 and other compressed files on it the archive will be very roughly something like 70% of the size of the uncompressed disk contents. If you have lots of jpg and other already compressed files you will achieve no compression for those files. THis would indicate that your 500GB drive will not hold 1120GB of compressed data. Compressing an already compressed file can sometimes make them larger!

sam 30/04/2011 - 14:19