How to Backup Encrypted Hard Drive with Best Free Software
Need to backup BitLocker encrypted drive
Encrypting a hard drive is a good way to protect your data from unauthorized access and keep some important information from leaking to others. For example, if your computer contains some important information, you can encrypt the drive. And only the one who knows the password can access the hard drive while others cannot.
It is popular among people to use BitLocker to protect data security. Many editions of Windows and Windows Server have introduced BitLocker as a built-in feature. BitLocker is a technology that allows you to encrypt your entire hard disk including the operating system.
Although you have encrypted your hard drive, it never means your data on the hard drive is completely secure. Encryption only works for your data confidentiality. If you want to get lost data back, you should backup the encrypted hard drive in advance.
Actually, there are many things that may cause data loss, like hard disk failure, system corruption, malware or virus attack, etc. If you have backed up the hard drive beforehand, when bad things happen on your computer, you can always restore your hard drive from the image backup you created before.
How to backup encrypted hard drive
Common tools cannot backup encrypted hard drive, so you need professional backup software. Here, I will introduce a piece of awesome disk backup software. You can read on to learn more about this disk backup software and follow the corresponding graphic tutorial to backup BitLocker encrypted drive.
Free backup software
Qiling Disk Master Standard is free disk backup software designed for Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP.
- It allows you to backup system, disk, partition or specific files to different locations like external hard drive, cloud drive, NAS, etc.
- With sector by sector backup embedded, you can backup all sectors of disks or partitions whether they are used or not. This feature makes it possible to backup encrypted hard drive.
- Also, this software supports automatic backup, thus keeping the backup image up to date.
Go ahead and see how to backup encrypted files on a hard drive.
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 Sector by sector backup mode. This mode requires the destination path to have at least the same capacity as the source disk.
- Notes:✎...
- "Make an Exact Backup" will backup all sectors of the hard drive whether used or not, so it will take much time and space. If you want to save time and space, you can decrypt the hard drive first, and then backup it with "Intelligent Sector Backup". "Intelligent Sector Backup" only backs up the used space, so it is much faster than sector by sector backup.
- There are other backup options you can configure, such as email notification and image file compression. You can also encrypt your backups so that only the one who knows the password can restore the image backup. (Password encryption is available for advanced editions.)
Step 5. Go back to the interface of Disk Backup and click Proceed.
💡 Advanced settings you may need
>> Schedule Backup: You can schedule backup your hard drive with five modes: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Event Triggers, and USB plug in.
>> Backup Scheme: You are allowed to choose different backup methods (Full/Incremental/Differential Backup) and enable automatic backup cleanup feature to save disk space. The differential backup method and cleanup feature are available in the paid version. Upgrade the software if needed.
If you backed up your disks or partitions in the sector by sector mode, you can subsequently perform a sector by sector restore.
Conclusion
To make a conclusion, even if you have encrypted your hard drive, it is still very crucial to backup the hard drive. An image backup enables you to recover lost data when needed.
With Sector by sector backup feature of Qiling Disk Master, you can backup encrypted hard drive without efforts. The best part is you can even encrypt the backup image, which provides double protection for your data. (paid feature)
Qiling Disk Master is designed for your data security and works fine in Windows 11/10/8/7/XP/Visa. It is also fantastic disk cloning software. You are allowed to clone encrypted hard drive to SSD with sector by sector mode.
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