Acronis True Image's "Plan B"
It always pays to have a "Plan B" waiting in the wings for most things in life, and backups are no different. Acronis Startup Recovery Manager and Acronis Secure Zone are Acronis True Image 10 Home's "Plan B".
Acronis Startup Recovery Manager allows you to run Acronis True Image directly from your boot drive before Windows loads. It accomplishes this feat by overwriting the MBR with its own proprietary boot code. On boot-up, right after the last of the information generated by the BIOS has scrolled by, you'll see a prompt to press the <F11> function key to start Acronis Startup Recovery Manger (if you do nothing, Windows will boot shortly after the prompt disappears). You'll be presented with a menu that will allow you to either run the full version of Acronis True Image, boot to Windows, or Exit (which reboots the system). Using Acronis Startup Recovery Manager's version of Acronis True Image is pretty much like using it from bootable rescue media or directly in Windows.
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Acronis Secure Zone is a special partition that can be created on any local hard drive, where you can store Acronis True Image backups. The partition is created by borrowing available unused space from the drive and can be dynamically resized as needed without losing any backup archives stored there.
Most PCs have a single hard drive installed, or two or more drives in a RAID volume, which appears as a single drive. In both of these instances, the single drive and RAID volume are boot drives. Normally, you cannot use any program — not even Acronis True Image — to create an image backup of a drive to itself. With Acronis Secure Zone installed, this is no longer a problem. Acronis Secure Zone can be used in conjunction with Acronis Startup Recovery Manager to provide you with a protected location (Acronis Secure Zone cannot be seen by normal Windows applications) to backup your local drive. While you can install Acronis Secure Zone without Acronis Startup Recovery Manager, you cannot install Acronis Startup Recovery Manager unless Acronis Secure Zone is created before or during the installation and activation of Acronis Startup Recovery Manager.
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There are a number of advantages to using Acronis Startup Recovery Manager and Acronis Secure Zone:
- You'll always have a copy of Acronis True Image ready to revive your system without the need for bootable recovery media.
- When you perform backup to Acronis Secure Zone, you don't have to worry about naming your backup archives — Acronis Secure Zone does it automatically for you.
- Since the usual "overhead" of running under Windows doesn't enter the picture and Acronis Secure Zone is installed on a local hard drive, backups and restores will be faster than they would be going over a network or removable media.
- Using Acronis Secure Zone will insure that all full and differential or incremental backups will be kept in the same location, which is crucial if you need to restore your system to its last good functioning state.
- A new feature for Acronis Secure Zone in Acronis True Image is the ability to password protect Acronis Secure Zone to prevent unauthorized access to backups with sensitive data (very useful for laptop users).
There are some disadvantages, however, to Acronis Secure Zone:
- The main disadvantage is that if your primary hard drive crashes with Acronis Startup Recovery manager and Acronis Secure Zone on it — you've lost everything — including any backups you could have used to recover your system. You're a little better off if Acronis Secure Zone is on a second hard drive in your PC dedicated for backups — but not much if that drive fails.
- There is no quick and easy way to copy the backup archives stored in Acronis Secure Zone to an external hard drive or to CD/DVD media for safe keeping.
Third-party boot managers will probably have to be re-enabled or re-installed after activating Acronis Startup Recovery Manager. Acronis highly recommends that Linux loaders like LiLo and GRUB should be installed to a Linux root or boot partition rather than the MBR before installing and enabling Acronis Startup Recovery Manager.
Acronis Startup Recovery Manager and Acronis Secure Zone can be removed at any time as easily as they were installed. Removing Acronis Secure Zone returns the unused space it borrowed from the partition of the hard drive it was created on, and any archive files that were stored there.
Remember, although Acronis Secure Zone is an excellent fall-back option, it's just that — a fall-back option. You should not rely on Acronis Secure Zone as your only backup strategy with Acronis True Image, but as a supplement to a more comprehensive strategy that involves backups to additional removable or non-removable media to eliminate as many "single-points-of-failures" in your backup routine as possible.