Can't activate Acronis Secure Zone
All,
I have ATIH 2012 installed in a system with Win 7 Ult. 64-bit. Hard drive has two partitions--one is that reserved system partition Windows 7 installs. ATIH installed successfully and I activated it. I tried to activate the Acronis Secure Zone for my backups. But no can do. I follow the setup steps in Windows, the computer reboots, during the reboot process Step 1 is briefly displayed, the computer reboots again, Windows starts, and that's it. No ASZ partition is set up. I've tried establishing the ASZ several times, uninstalled and reinstalled ATIH 2012, but it's always the same. Cannot establish ASZ. Am I missing something obvious? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Bruce
I second Scott's recommendation. Secure Zone is a poor place to store backups. I understand why Acronis introduced it, as it was back in a day when extra hard drives were more expensive and some users wanted to store backups on their only drive. But, it is not a real backup solution, as any hard drive errors may render your drive unbootable and your backups inaccessible or at least unusable.
Moreover, many people have had serious issues with their operating systems after activating the Acronis Secure Zone. My advice is to avoid it. Buy an external hard drive. They are cheap these days.
Hi Scott,
Thanks for the reply. I guess I never looked at it that way before--tunnel vision. I do have a NAS drive and perhaps that's the better way to go.
Bruce
So I found this discussion 10 months late, but Bruce, if you're still out there, (or anyone else with the same problem) I believe that the answer you received was, shall I say, non-responsive?
I use the Secure Zone on my hard drive as one of THREE lines of backup defense. I have used the SZ to recover corrupted data on more than one occasion, and I used it at least once to recover my whole system when I was getting BSD from some kind of badly-installed update.
YES, of course you need an external drive backup in case of hard drive failure, but (knock on wood) I've never had a hard drive failure in many years (and many versions) of using Acronis. My failures have been software or file corruption (usually my fault for screwing up a complex client tax return beyond repair, LOL), and with the Secure Zone on my drive and Acronis Recovery activated, I don't have to get in the car to go retrieve my offsite external drive in order to recover from such events.
Thus, the SZ is extremely useful to me, and I was REALLY frustrated upon purchasing and loading TI 2013 onto my new system and having the same problem as you - the SZ acted like it was being set up and my system even told me to reboot, giving me graphical notices that various steps were being taken in the process - with no result - the disk drive status utility showed only the original partition, all in green, with no sign of the SZ.
MY SOLUTION: I partitioned my new hard drive in Win 7, then told TI to set up the Secure Zone in the new partition. The setup process was a bit different, and I was NOT asked to reboot, but TI now shows the new partition with SZ activated (clearly labeled as Acronis SZ and showing pale blue instead of green) and I just set up my daily mirror backup into the SZ upon shutdown. I did not assign a drive letter to the partition so it doesn't show up in my Win Explorer, but TI knows it's there.
I hope this helps.
Jan