Vista Backup and Bitlocker

[Guest]

I normally use Retrospect for making my backups. It appears that it has
problems seeing the system drive after installing bitlocker. Can Vista's
native backup app backup the user data on the system drive, and if so, is it
encrypted or backed up without encryption? If encrypted, and you reinstall
Vista how would you get access to the encrypted data upon restore?

 

[Rich Milburn]

Yes, Vista's backup can back up BitLocker drives. The backup file is not
encrypted, but the contents of the backup are. It's a drive image, so if
you restored, you'd have the same state as before the backup and access it
in the same way as before. Vista's backup does a block-level backup of the
volume. Does that answer your question?

Rich

 

[Guest]

Thanks Rich, but doesn't answer my question. Don't want to do the image type
backup, but the file level backup. Imaging will restore the drive but when
Vista is available at retail, I don't want to (nor will I be able to as I'm
running x64) upgrade from RC 2 to retail but do want to be able to restore my
user docs.

Right now Vista backup is giving me an error message whenever I try to
perform a file level backup. Sorry but I'm unencrypting the drive now and
didn't write down the error message but thought it may be related to backup
not being fully functional with bitlocker and encryption at this point. I'll
find out later as I have a new primary hard drive to install this afternoon
and will try Vista's backup again before initiating bitlocker.

But if anybody else has any experience with the two I'd be glad to hear from
them.

 

[Rich Milburn]

Hello Mark,
sorry, I guess I misunderstood your question. I haven't tried the file level
backup but I do not think that it would maintain any encryption from bitlocker...

What about just using the migration tools with Vista to save your stuff?

Rich

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

And I think you would need the 48 character encryption key to decrypt it.