Acronis Backup & Recovery

Acronis Secure Zone

Acronis Secure Zone is a secure partition that enables keeping backup archives on a managed machine disk space and therefore recovery of a disk to the same disk where the backup resides.

Certain Windows applications, such as Acronis disk management tools, can access the zone.

Should the disk experience a physical failure, the zone and the archives located there will be lost. That’s why Acronis Secure Zone should not be the only location where a backup is stored. In enterprise environments, Acronis Secure Zone can be thought of as an intermediate location used for backup when an ordinary location is temporarily unavailable or connected through a slow or busy channel.

  Advantages  

Acronis Secure Zone:

• Enables recovery of a disk to the same disk where the disk’s backup resides.
• Offers a cost-effective and handy method for protecting data from software malfunction, virus attack, operator error.
• Being an internal archive storage, eliminates the need for a separate media or network connection to back up or recover the data. This is especially useful for mobile users.
• Can serve as a primary destination when using dual destination backup.

  Limitations  

• The zone cannot be organized on a dynamic disk or a disk using the GPT partitioning style.
• Backup to Acronis Secure Zone is not possible when working under bootable media or Acronis Startup Recovery Manager.

  Managing the Acronis Secure Zone  

Acronis Secure Zone is considered as a personal vault. Once created on a managed machine, the zone is always present in the list of Personal vaults. Centralized backup plans can use Acronis Secure Zone as well as local plans.

If you have used Acronis Secure Zone before, please note a radical change in the zone functionality. The zone does not perform automatic cleanup, that is, deleting old archives, anymore. Use backup schemes with automatic cleanup to back up to the zone, or delete outdated backups manually using the archive management functionality.

With the new Acronis Secure Zone behavior, you obtain the ability to:

• list archives located in the zone and backups contained in each archive
• examine a backup’s content
• mount a disk backup to copy files from the backup to a physical disk
• safely delete archives and backups from the archives.

For more information about operations available in Acronis Secure Zone, see the Personal vaults section.

  Upgrade from Acronis True Image Echo  

When upgrading from Acronis True Image Echo to Acronis Backup & Recovery 10, Acronis Secure Zone will keep the archives created with Echo. The zone will appear in the list of personal vaults and the old archives will be available for recovery.