Acronis Secure Zone

The Acronis Secure Zone is a secure partition that lets you keep backups on a managed machine disk space. This lets you recover a disk where the disk backup resides.

When you create an Acronis Secure Zone, an icon appears under My Computer in the Other section. Double-clicking on the Acronis Secure Zone icon opens the Secure Zone and you can view all the backups it contains. You can also open the Secure Zone by right-clicking on its icon and choosing Open in the shortcut menu.

Double-clicking on a backup icon shows all backup versions (full, incremental, differential) contained in that backup. Right-clicking on a specific backup version opens the shortcut menu allowing you to choose a desired operation. For example, you can choose explore, mount (for image backups), recover, validate, update, remove the backup, and view the backup's details. If Acronis Secure Zone is password-protected, any operation, except viewing backup details, will require entering the password. Double-clicking on a backup will open the backup.

The shortcut menu that appears after right-clicking on the Acronis Secure Zone icon has two more items – Open and Create Shortcut (for placing it on the Desktop).

The Acronis Secure Zone is available as a location to store backup files as long as it has free space. If there is not enough space, older backups will be deleted to create free space.

Acronis True Image 2014 uses the following approach to clean up the Acronis Secure Zone:

• If you are in the process of creating a backup and there is not enough free space in the zone to create it, the program will display a dialog which warns you that the Acronis Secure Zone is full. You can click Cancel to cancel the backup operation. In that case, you may want to increase the size of the Acronis Secure Zone and then run the backup operation again. If you want to free up some space in the zone, click OK and the oldest full backup version of the type being created will be deleted with all subsequent incremental/differential backup versions. The backup operation will then recommence.
• If deleting the oldest backup does not free up enough space, you will get the same warning message again. You may delete the next oldest backup (if any) and repeat this until all the previous backups are deleted.
• If after deleting all the previous backups there is still not enough space for completing the backup, you will get an error message and the backup will be canceled.

The program distinguishes only two types of backups in the zone: image backups and file-level backups. File and E-mail backups are considered as file-level type backups. For example, if you have an e-mail backup in the zone and there is not enough space for backing up a folder, the program will delete the e-mail backup to free up space for the folder backup.

You can use the Acronis Secure Zone as the storage for virtual system changes in the Try mode. The Try&Decide data will be automatically cleaned up after you stop a Try&Decide session.

If the Acronis Secure Zone is used as the Nonstop Backup data destination, the program does not clean up such data automatically. You can clean up Nonstop Backup data manually. For more information see Acronis Nonstop Backup data storage.

In order to not worry about zone overflow during a scheduled backup, it is recommended to select the When not enough space in ASZ, delete the oldest backup box in the scheduled backup options (Error handling).