Good questions, Marc.
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- the main thing I don’t get is the ‘Acronis Secure Zone’.
a) why would you want to store a backup on the same drive as the one that is being backed up?


If you had only one drive, it might provide insurance against OS corruption, for example. But it's certainly not the best plan and no help in the event of disk failure, or general computer catastrophe. Put backups on an external drive, or on DVD's, perhaps.
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b) surely creating the ASZ deprives the user of disk space (the manual, p 72, recommends that the disk space allocated to ASZ = 75% of the total volume of programmes and data being backed up)


The Secure Zone, of course, uses up disk space, but not more than the backups themselves. They can be fairly large, at 75% of the original.
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c) can ATI be used without setting up this partition?


Yes, you can ignore it, although backups saved outside a Secure Zone would theoretically be more exposed to accidental hosing. I do not use an SZ.
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- have all the bugs now been ironed out?


It's a completely mature program, operates without quirks.

You should nevertheless look into a newer image program called "MACRIUM REFLECT". I have tried it out extensively with good success. They offer a very capable FREE version, which works as well as Acronis -- same speed and perfectly equivalent results. Recommended.

Last edited by allis; 03/09/09 12:39 PM.