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ATI 2021 and Bitlocker

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My first instinct after unpacking a brand-new computer is get the latest ATI, build a bootable flash drive and take a partition-level backup. There was a slight complication this time. It’s called bitlocker. Not to worry, I put a manage-bcd command in startnet.cmd to unlock the drive. I can browse the drive, I have R/W access, life is great. I can “even” do an ATI backup. I get a .tib file. I can see it, I can browse it… It’s what an ATI backup is supposed to look like.

But who was is that said that backup is the easy half of the equation? The next part of the fire drill was a restore. Hmm… Not so good. ATI behaved strangely. Below is what it thinks needs doing:

Operations

Number of operations: 2

  1. Deleting partition
    Hord disk: 1

Drive letter.           C:

File system:           NTFS

Volume label:         OS

Size:         933.0 GB

  1. Copying and merging partitions Hard disk: 7

Drive letter            C:, C: - > C:

File system:          NTFS, None -> NTFS

Volume label:         OS

Size:   933.0 GB, 933.0 GB - > 933.0 GB

When I click “Proceed” on this, I’m told to reboot. Why does ATI think it needs to delete the partition? And merge C: with C: ?

Is there something more I can do to allow a successful restore? I’d like to think there’s a way to get past this problem, other turning bitlocker off entirely.

The computer is Dell Inspiron 7400, Win10-64, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB NVMe drive.

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Jan, you can make successful backups of BitLocker encrypted drives from within Windows using ATI 2021 because the encryption is unlocked as far as the backup operation is concerned but the backup image will also be stored as an unencrypted image file unless you use the option in ATI to encrypt the image using a password and encryption method (set in the Advanced options).

If you create the 'Simple' version of the Acronis Rescue Media from within Windows, this will also include support for BitLocker but you will need to unlock the drive after booting from that rescue media before you can access any protected drives.

Disk backups in ATI 2021 now use .tibx format backup image files, not .tib unless you are backing up to optical media or using FTP.  This includes backups made using rescue media.

It is not recommended to start any disk recovery involving the OS drive from within Windows using ATI, the reason being that this will always require a restart but that restart will boot into a small Linux based OS environment which has no support for BitLocker and may not support your NVMe drive if RAID is being used for performance reasons!

When doing any disk recovery, the first action by ATI will always be to initialise the target disk drive in order to prepare it using the partition scheme identified from the backup image being recovered from.  For your NVMe drive, this should be using GPT and the PC booting in UEFI mode, including when booting from the rescue media.

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Hello Jan Buelens,

here you can also find some information on the BitLocker support in Acronis products:

62662: Acronis True Image and BitLocker FAQ

56619: Acronis True Image: compatibility with BitLocker