Problems with BitLocker
Hi. Windows 8.1 pro on a Sony Vaio SVD1322Z9EB laptop.
I am trying to take a bootable image of my hard drive onto a USB flash drive.
It fails because it detects a Bitlocker drive.
The error message instructed me to create an Acronis Bootable Media instead.
So I did that. I made the USB flash drive an Acronis bootable drive.
I then booted up to the USB drive and ran Acronis from the options provided.
Acronis then invited me among other things to make a backup of my hard drive, which option I selected.
It still failed because the source drive was a BitLocker drive.
This despite the comment in KnowledgeBase reference 56619 that Acronis True Image 2016 is compatible with BitLocker and will back up a BitLocker encrypted drive.
I then ran a normal reboot went to Control Panel and selcted "BitLocker drive encryption".
It says under Operating system drive "C: BitLocker waiting for activation". Beside this there is an icon labelled "Turn on BitLocker".
Now I am more confused than ever. If I am prompted to "Turn on Bitlocker" I conclude, reasonably to my mind, that BitLocker is currently turned "off". That being the case, what is preventing Acronis from backing up the drive?
I am reluctant to turn on BitLocker. Aside from this backup problem my machine functions fine, and I do not want to do something that might compromise that. I never wanted a BitLocker drive in the first place.
Any ideas? Thanks.
Hello Jack,
Thank you for your posting! There is a known issue, where changes are not applied after system reboot, our development team is working on it. Could you please send Acronis System report as a feedback from your machine. As workaround I would suggest using backup and restore option to migrate your data to USB.
Thank you,
Jack,
Instead of using the clone option, you should be able to take a full disk image (select all paritions) once the drive is not encyrypted. Save the image to another location (not the place you plan to push the image to). Once the image is created, you can then "restore" the image to the new disk and that should work without issue. It's essentially the same outcome, and you have the bonus of having a nice backup for safety as well.
I want to do a 'bare metal' backup of my Wind 10 Pro Bitlocker encryped hard drive so I can recover the backup as it is now.
When I try, I am confused by what TI says: "Unable to back up a locked volume encrypted with BitLocker. Unlock the volume or turn off BitLocker, and then try again"
I assume that if I either unlock it, or turn it off, then the backup will not be identical to my hard drive as it is now, correct?
Any advice on how I could do what I used to do with the combination of TI and True Crypt: backup the whole drive 'as is', and then (if necessary) do a simple TI restore of the whole back up to my computer? (That was an 'outside of Windows backup' that took more time, but the restore was completely like the backed up drive.)
Thank you very much!
Mike, please see KB document https://kb.acronis.com/content/56619 for information on ATIH and Bitlocker.
In essence, you can backup your encrypted drive when using ATIH 2016 within Windows 10, because at that point ATIH can 'see' the drive as though it wasn't encrypted, and the consequence of this is that the drive image you create is also not encrypted. Hence when restoring, your system will also no longer be encrypted with Bitlocker and you will need to reactivate this.
You cannot create an Acronis image of your encrypted drive with the Acronis bootable rescue media.
There are hardware drive clone docking stations available that could attempt to clone your encrypted drive by doing a sector by sector copy, this would take much longer than a normal backup as every sector on the source drive would need to be copied.
Mike, Steve is correct. Long story short, if you have a bitlockered machine, Acronis can only back it up while it is booted into Windows and "unlocked" at that point. You can then image it with Acronis, but the image will also be "unlocked" in this state. Restoring that image will produce an "unlocked" machine and then you need to enable bitlocker on it again. There is no way around this with imaging utilities. If there was, that would defeat the purpose of using bitlocker in the first place.
I know this is an old post, but just in case people get here via "googling". Jack Sheet almost got it work with a bootable Acronis 2016 USB / DVD to backup a Windows 10 drive that is "waiting for BitLocker Activation". (I'm sure this works with 2018).
Activate BitLocker the drive, and then "disabled" it, it will decrypt the drive. It now no longer shows up as a BitLocker encrypted drive on the bootable Acronis 2016 bootable USB / DVD. You can make an image/restore with no problems whatsoever. I also disabled Secure boot in the BIOS of my Dell laptop, not sure if that is needed. You can then re-enable BitLocker if needed.
Ekaterina wrote:Hello Jack,
Thank you for your posting! There is a known issue, where changes are not applied after system reboot, our development team is working on it. Could you please send Acronis System report as a feedback from your machine. As workaround I would suggest using backup and restore option to migrate your data to USB.
Thank you,
А нахрена тогда программа нужна??? Рашифруй, зашивруй - это геморой на ж..пу
Hello Andrey,
The program needs access to the disks in order to create a system image. If you are running a backup in Windows (not under a bootable media), you don't need to unlock the drives manually, they are in the unlocked state already.
Unlocked state means that the disk is accessible to the operating system and the programs in the current Windows user session without any key/password/USB. It is by design Microsoft Windows behavior that Microsoft Volume Shadow copy service exposes the encrypted disk for backup software and other programs without asking them to enter BitLocker key/password/connect special BitLocker USB key. Acronis True Image reads the disk and saves it into the backup exactly the same way as if BitLocker was not enabled at all.