How to Backup Encrypted Hard Drive with Best Free Software
Need to backup BitLocker encrypted drive
Encrypting a hard drive protects your data by only allowing access to those who know the password, keeping sensitive information private.
BitLocker is a popular data protection feature that comes built-in with many editions of Windows and Windows Server. It allows users to encrypt their entire hard disk, including the operating system, providing a high level of security for their data.
You've encrypted your hard drive, but that doesn't guarantee your data's complete security. Encryption only protects confidentiality, not against data loss. To prevent losing data, you should back up your encrypted hard drive in advance.
Data loss can occur due to various reasons such as hard disk failure, system corruption, or malware attacks. However, if you have created a backup of your hard drive beforehand, you can restore it from the image backup in case of an issue.
How to backup encrypted hard drive
To backup an encrypted hard drive, such as one with BitLocker encryption, you'll need professional backup software as common tools won't suffice. Fortunately, there is a reliable disk backup software available that can help you achieve this. I'll introduce you to this software and provide a step-by-step graphic tutorial to guide you through the process of backing up your encrypted drive.
Free backup software
Qiling Disk Master Standard is a free disk backup software designed for Windows operating systems, including Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP.
- This software enables you to backup your entire system, individual disks, partitions, or specific files to various storage locations such as external hard drives, cloud drives, NAS devices, and more.
- With sector by sector backup, users can back up all sectors of disks or partitions, including unused ones, allowing for the backup of encrypted hard drives. This comprehensive approach ensures that every sector, used or not, is included in the backup, providing a complete and secure copy of the data.
- This software supports automatic backup, keeping the backup image up to date.
To backup encrypted files on a hard drive, you can use a combination of built-in Windows features and third-party software. First, make sure you have enabled BitLocker or another full-disk encryption method on your system.
Detailed steps to backup encrypted hard drive
Step 1. Download Qiling Disk Master Standard, install and run the software.
Step 2. At the main interface of the software, click Backup > Disk Backup.
Step 3. Select the disk you need to backup by clicking Disks. Then, select another location as the destination path.
Step 4. To backup the encrypted drive, click the "Sector by sector backup" mode, which requires the destination path to have at least the same capacity as the source disk.
- Notes:✎...
- "To backup a hard drive, you can use "Make an Exact Backup" which will backup all sectors, including unused space, taking up a lot of time and space. Alternatively, you can first decrypt the hard drive and then use "Intelligent Sector Backup" which only backs up the used space, making it much faster and more space-efficient.
- There are other backup options you can configure, such as email notification and image file compression, and you can also encrypt your backups for added security.
Step 5. Go back to the interface of Disk Backup and click Proceed.
💡 Advanced settings you may need
>> Schedule Backup: You can schedule backups of your hard drive using five different modes: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Event Triggers, and USB plug in.
>> Backup Scheme: You can choose from different backup methods, including full, incremental, and differential backups, and also enable automatic backup cleanup to save disk space, with the differential backup and cleanup feature available in the paid version, and you may need to upgrade the software.
If you have backed up your disks or partitions in sector by sector mode, you can then perform a sector by sector restore.
Conclusion
Even if you've encrypted your hard drive, backing it up is still crucial. An image backup allows you to recover lost data when needed, providing an extra layer of protection and peace of mind.
With Qiling Disk Master's sector by sector backup feature, you can easily backup an encrypted hard drive, and even encrypt the backup image for double protection, all without much effort, thanks to this paid feature.
Qiling Disk Master is designed for data security and works on Windows 11/10/8/7/XP/Visa. It's also a great disk cloning software that allows cloning an encrypted hard drive to an SSD using sector-by-sector mode.
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