Acronis Secure Zone

Tim, the Acronis Secure Zone is just another name for a dedicated modified FAT32 partition created on your disk drive.  It is purely a container for where you can store your backup files, not an application in its own right.

The only changes that get stored in the ASZ are those created by running your backup tasks in the main ATI application, so if your backup captures changes to the Windows OS, whether good or bad, that would be included in the backup image stored there, or stored in any other location.

Oh, I always thought the purpose of the ASZ was to automatically back up your System in case you had a failure.  That way you could recover your System if it failed to boot by typing F11 or whatever key was set up by the ASZ Manager.  But a person could do that just by putting the Rescue Disc in the DVD drive and boot from that.

It kind of sounds like an unnecessary step and a great waste of HDD space to create that partition on your C: Drive to accomodate the ASZ.  I never was too sure about it and several versions of ATIH back I experimented with it. I went part way to setting it up so I could see how much of my 1 TB C: Drive would be used for it.  ASZ Manager was suggesting around 567 GB and I wanted to check with someone more knowledgeable than I am before I used up so much HDD space.  I guess its greatest value would be for someone who did not have an external HDD or a second internal HDD to store Acronis backups.

Thanks for your help, Steve.  It's always good to have a knowledge source to help when in doubt.

I would like to say, here, that I have been using ATIH since way back in version 10 (not 2010) when my pc was using Windows XP!  During that time there have been many times that Acronis has saved my hide from a real System mess!  I have often talked to people about their pcs and asked them why in the world don't they have Acronis.  Most of the time they had never even heard of Acronis.  I like to think I may have educated them to that extent at least that they should get Acronis True Image Home.

Thanks, again,

Tim Sherwood

P.S.

This Support Forum has improved tremendously over time, too. ;-)

Tim, just for clarity here, the F11 key on boot is provided by the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager function (ASRM) but this is just an alternative to using a (Linux based) Acronis Rescue media (CD or USB) and can be used to get into the ATI application. 

The downside to ASRM / F11 is simply that it is installed in the MBR of the HDD or SSD, so if the disk fails this is not available, so you are back to the separate rescue media anyway.

ASRM can work with the ASZ as a place to backup to or recover from, but as above, there is no automatic creation of such backups without action on the part of the user to setup a schedule to perform this action and identify what is to be included.

ATI does include features for both 'Try and Decide' and also 'Non Stop Backup' which can add a greater degree of protection, but these are not things that I personally use as have never either had the need for them, nor found them to be that successful when I tried them.  You can only ever have one NSB task per system for example, and the task will use all available space on the backup destination location!  TnD doesn't like dual-boot systems which my main computer is!

OK., Steve, thanks again.  You know, I have been thinking about my own question about ASZ and I think I was confusing it with Windows Recovery with its System Protection Program.  I have found "going back to an earlier installation of Windows through their System Protection doesn't always work and I get the message, "No changes have been made to your Windows System."

Anyway, thanks for all your kind help.

Tim

Tim, glad to try to help.  Be careful if relying on System Protection in Windows as Microsoft have taken to turning this off in some recent Updates, so there may be no restore point data available.