location advice for Acronis Secure Zone
Even tho I've had TI Home v11 build8,022 several years, I've never needed it until recently when both my pc's have gone to blue screen of death reporting missing/corrupted Windows/System32/Config/System directory which prevents Windows XP Pro SP3 from launching.
FWIW, this occured during watching hulu.com in both cases.
Acronis TI would not restore in either case; it seems like it can't find an intermediary place from which to conduct the restore. As you can tell, I've never really understood how Acronis works and it is not very intuitive.
So I'm going to try establishing a Secure Zone hoping that will solve the problem next time. So where is the intelligent place to locate the Secure Zone? On my one and only 500GB hard drive C:\? On the 100GB USB external drive on which the backups are located? On a second 500GB USB external drive?
Thanks for any info. I know you are busy.
Sincerely, John
Pat,
Thanks for responding; sorry for the delayed response.
I wish I'd had time to generate an elaboration but I did not; plus I really don't know what happened; meanwhile, I've had one crashed pc restored by an outside source. I would like to become independant of that source; that's why I bought ATI; now I just need to learn how to use it.
I'm trying to find out if a Secure Zone will help me recover from another crash involving missing/corrupt system files without having to reformat my harddrive and without the Windows XP Pro SP3 reinstall. I assume that can be done as long as the pc can recognize the bootable ATI cdrom. IF having a Secure Zone will make a full restoration more intuitive, I can put it on the same external USB drive which contains my ATI full backup and incremental backkups OR I can put on a different external USB drive.
John,
I am not sure a Secure Zone provides more benefits than a regular folder on your disk *except* that:
- your backups can be a little more protected, since it is a special partition and you can put a password to protect the entire zone, and avoid that files might be deleted by users or malware. Any other encryption of the folder would not be visible by Acronis outside of the Windows environment.
- your backups can be managed from a size perspective, since within the ASZ, the older backups are automatically deleted when space is needed. You can reproduce this with autocleanup settings within a regular folder, though.
There are some drawbacks as well:
- in older versions of ATI, the ASZ is formatted in FAT32, so the backups cannot be big files, they have to split up,
- in any version, you cannot move archives around with WIndows Explorer. The files are confined to the ASZ. YOu can *move* the backup using ATI, but you cannot copy. Also you cannot use the ASZ as a reserve copy destination (you can use it as the main destination, and have a reserve copy somewhere else, though).
- with ATI 2011, I noticed there is less flexibility with naming (probably a bug). For example, adding date and time tags to the file name doesn't work.
The ASZ will not change how a restore will happen, or make it more intuitive