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Saving backup image to encrypted portable drive

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Our service techs are frequently required to take a complete image of a system, before making any changes.

They do this by booting to an Acronis TI 16 CD and backing up all partitions to a portable hard drive.

There are now a collection of images on these USB portable drives that contain sensitive customer data. I want to use an encryption tool (Bitlocker, Truecrypt etc) and encrypt this portable drive. 

Will Acronis (when booted from CD) be able to recognise and unlock these drives, to enable our service guys to save back up a system to them? If not, anyone have any other ideas other than using a second, unencrpyted drive?

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schooleydoo, welcome to these user forums.

Simple answer to you question is No.  The Acronis Rescue Media has no support to allow the unencrypting of a BitLocker or other program encrypted external disk drive - the drive must be unencrypted before it can be used.

The exception to this if for backups that are created from within the Acronis GUI program running in Windows where the encryption has already been unlocked as part of the boot or start process - in such a case, Acronis would not know that any encryption is present or involved, but the resulting backup file created by Acronis will also be unencrypted.

As far as I am aware this will apply to any other similar backup products.

See KB document: 56619: Acronis True Image 2016: Compatibility with BitLocker

As I thought. Thanks for confirming Steve.

schooleydoo....welcome to the forums.

I believe there is a way to add bitlocker support to ATI WinPE rescue media...please refer to the links below:

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/55683

https://4sysops.com/archives/unlock-bitlocker-under-windows-pe/

Mustang is the resident expert on WinPE.  If you have specific questions he may be able to help.  I will follow this thread with interest.

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