I have been a long-time user of Acronis True Image, but I have never really taken the time to set up the Acronis Secure Zone on my PC. No real reason, other than I am pretty good at running weekly full partition backups to my ioSafe external drive (see my review of the ioSafe Solo here).
However, with a laptop that is not always connected to the external drive, another backup solution is needed and the Acronis Secure Zone fits the bill perfectly.
What is the Acronis Secure Zone?
Most likely, if you own a fairly recent name-brand computer (Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc) it came with a ‘recovery partition’ instead of (or in addition to) a set of recovery discs. It would be this partition or disc(s) you would use to recover your PC to ‘day one’ condition, with all the software as well as the operating system – Windows- looking just the same as when you took it home from the store and opened the box. Great in case of a corrupt Windows installation, but restoring your PC in this way wipes all of your personal data as well!
Of course, you have been backing up all those priceless digital images, emails, documents, spreadsheets and such, haven’t you?
Well, if you haven’t, then Acronis True Image 2011 is well worth a look.
The Acronis Secure Zone (ASZ) is like a recovery partition, but it restores the most recent configuration of your PC with everything intact just like it was when the snapshot was created. It is easy to set up for the Acronis Secure Zone Wizard does most of the work for you. Once you start it, it determines how much free space is available to create it, and you can adjust the size if need be. I plan on just keeping the most recent Windows partition backup there, so I kept it on the small size. You can make it larger if you want to store more backup versions. It can also be adjusted later if you find you need more or less space for the ASZ.
Then the ASZ wizard will reboot your PC and create the partition for the ASZ. Once it is finished (my ASZ took about 5 minutes to create. YMMV) the PC will reboot again and you will get a screen saying that the ASZ was created successfully. Now, you can use the Acronis One-Click Backup to create an image to the ASZ as well as a separate file backup if you wish. You can also schedule it as often as you want, or turn off scheduling and run it manually. Or, use the ‘Non-Stop Backup’ option so you never have to worry about keeping your backups up to date.
James is the owner of WindowsTalk.org and has been a Microsoft Windows Consumer MVP since 2003.
I tried the trial version but while booting I dont see any message from Acronis telling me if to start acronis byhitting F10 or F…, if my memory is good it should say that. well this is on 7 ultimate, but was working on vista ultimate 32 bits.
Twitter: WindowsTalk
says:
That’s the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager. I had to reactivate it after creating the Acronis Secure Zone. Then you hit F11 at boot time to access it.