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Encrypting an external drive AFTER cloning

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I clone my hard drive to an external USB drive every week. Since I store the backup drive off-site, I have been encrypting it using BitLocker, a process that takes 24 to 30 hours. Two questions:

- If my primary internal hard drive fails and I have to replace it with the encrypted clone drive, will it work?

- Is there a better way to protect the external drive then by encrypting it with that very long process after the cloning?

Thanks very much.

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If you are encrypting after cloning, then you'd have to undo that before you could restore. Maybe you would be better off with a lockable drive -- Lenova used to sell one under the Thinkpad brand. I think it's sold under the Aegis name now. You can't access what's on the drive without the key combination (keyboard is built into the drive).

Alternatively, you could do disk/partition backups and encrypt with ATI (it's under Advanced settings). You can do AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) cryptographic algorithm with any of three key lengths – 128, 192 and 256. ATI could then read those backups so long as the person restoring knew the key. This would be my choice for time savings and security. Not to mention you can store more than one backup on a singly hard disk, so you get more eggs in the basket.