restore bitlocked C: from bitlocked D: with USB Acronis media?
I've seen several articles on using bitlocker with Acronis but they are either not very current or they do not explicitly deal with my setup. I would appreciate some info or URLS that deal with this context:
We have two Thinkpad Carbon X1 PCs with TPM-Bitlocker running Windows 8.1.1. Each has:
USB with Acronis backup/restore media.
USB with Windows 8.1 Recovery (which might be necessary?)
C: Bitlocked SSD with Acronis 11.5 installed and running daily; weekly backups are enforced by simply moving the Acronis folder to Acronis_YYYYMMDD and creating a new empty Acronis folder. I've done this for many years. I have regularly mounted these backups to restore files, etc.
D: Bitlocked external regular HD with Acronis backups -- password protected.
Nightly rsync backups between our two PCs of the current Acronis backups of each PC's D:-Acronis folders.
Of course, on each PC, since the C: drive is backed up to the D: drive using the Windows-installed Acronis, the backups are not Bitlocked encrypted, just password protected.
Say, a C: drive on one PC crashes. I would like to use the most current D:-drive Acronis backup to restore this drive to the SSD.
Somehow the D: drive has to be able to be accessed by the USB Acronis media? How? Can the PC boot with a blank or hosed C: drive at least opening an decrypted D: drive?
I saw a posting that a sector-by-sector restore might be used with Bitlocked drives? How does this relate to this context? Can the Acronis media access the blocked D: drive files to restore an encrypted C: drive? I think not. It seems the D: drive must somehow first be unlocked?
If the above fails, I could use the 2nd PC to restore the 1st PC to a new C: drive temporarily placed into the 2nd PC, using the current Acronis backup of the 1st PC on the 2nd PC's D: drive. If this is the only alternative, then is seems all users using C: and D: Bitlocked drives, without a 2nd PC set up as I have described, are really screwed if their C: drive gets hosed, making their Acronis backups useless in this context?

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Hello Lester,
It is also possible to create a WinPE-based bootable media that includes BitLocker support. We don't have specific instructions for this, but some of our users have had success doing this.
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