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[BUG] Acronis TrueImage 2017 Linux may erroneously backup TO a Bitlocker protected drive - not reproducible

Thread needs solution

ATIH 2017 NG b6116 (Linux / UEFI boot)

Scenario:
User has an internal SATA drive that is protected by Bitlocker - the backup of such a drive will not work and a warning is issued that the drive cannot be backed up.

After this drive has been successfully unencrypted by Windows, it is possible to backup the drive.
However the target drive (USB HDD) for the backup is encrypted with Bitlocker aswell.
The backup was considerably fast (14 GB compressed) using a USB 3.0 port. The backup was reported to be successful.

Problem:
ATIH was able to backup to an USB HDD that is actually encrypted with Bitlocker, but was not able to restore from this drive for the same reason.
 

Detailed description:
For some reason Acronis was successful to write a full backup from the unencrypted drive (internal HDD) to the encrypted drive (USB HDD) using the Linux UEFI boot medium. This should not be possible and funnily it was not reproducible anymore.

After I did the "successful" backup, I shut down the computer, replaced the internal HDD against an empty drive. I was not possible to restore the backup because ATIH reported me that the source drive (USB HDD) is protected by Bitlocker. /how ironic

So while some minutes ago ATIH was magically able to write a full backup to this drive I was not able to read from this drive, nor was the backup file actually visible on the USB HDD when attached under Windows (different PC) and Bitlocker was unlocked (transparent) under Windows.

So I wonder how this could happen at all. I was not able to reproduce that but for some reason ATIH did not detect the USB drive as Bitlocker encrypted in the first line.

Sorry I am coming up with a kind of magic error, but perhaps anyone is able to reproduce this. At any later time the USB drive partition was detected as Bitlocker partition and so not useable for backups and restore, which would be the expected behaviour.

0 Users found this helpful

Strange indeed! Karl, I don't have any bitlocker drives at the moment, but will give it a test down the road.  No idea how it would even allow the backup to occur, as the locked drive should be inaccessible altogether.  Perhaps you've just stumbled onto the next major Windows vulerability (like how we've been able to use Linux boot disks to gain access to Windows systems for years).

Hi Rob, nice to hear from you again. Yes it was pretty strange and my working collegue who sat beside me was pretty irritated aswell. This all happened while I tried to clone my business laptop and I was introducing him to ATIH.