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External drive needs to be fornatted

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I'm using true image 2019 with Windows 10 and attempting to do a full backup so I boot from an acronis recovery usb flash drive. I am using a WD external drive which I have encrypted I always unlock before I reboot from within win 10.  Now for some reason when I try to select it as destination it tells me it needs to be formatted.  It does not need to be formatted. I have always backed up this way and never had it say I need to format it. Anyone know what the problem is?

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Richard, welcome to these public User Forums.

What encryption program is being used here for your external backup drive?

I am surprised that you say this has worked for you in the past when rebooting from a USB rescue media drive after unlocking the drive in Windows and the drive remained unlocked when in the rescue environment, as I would expect the encryption to be locked when rebooting!

If ATI sees the drive as encrypted, it will consider that it needs to be formatted before it can be used.

The normal expection when working with encrypted drives and using Acronis Rescue Media is that the encryption would need to be unlocked from the offline rescue environment.