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Creating System Image of a Fully Encrypted Disk

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Hi,

I want to create a system image of my Windows 10 on a USB flash drive for recovery purposes. The operating system is installed on a fully encrypted disk.  From my experience with another backup program my flash memory must have free space equal to or larger than the entire encrypted disk because the backup program will not know what to copy. My system takes up only 42 GB and I want to use a 65 GB USB flash drive to store the system image. Is it possible to do this with your backup program? And if not and I will have to copy the entire disk space onto a larger USB flash drive, will the encryption cause problems when I will be loading the image using a recovery tool?

Cheers,

Mike

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Mike, welcome to these public User Forums.

Acronis True Image can only make a full backup of your encrypted system disk drive if this is done from within Windows 10 using the ATI application when the drive 'appears' as if it is not encrypted to the software.  The resulting backup image on the target backup drive would be unencrypted other than by the password encryption provided within the ATI application itself.

See KB 56619: Acronis True Image: compatibility with BitLocker - for the official Acronis statement which would apply to other encryption software as well as to BitLocker.

One of the core issues with encrypted drives is that the partition structure and file system may not be recognisable and some data presented from the drive to bootable media may show as 'bad sectors' etc.  This means that to be able backup or recover such an encrypted drive from boot media would require that this would need to have a means of decrypting the drive.

The MVP Custom ATIPE Builder tool (link in my signature) has the ability to inject support for BitLocker encryption into the rescue media, but even this requires manual unlocking after booting into the Rescue media environment.