Hardware-independent restores and Bitlocker?

[JadePhoenix29]

I have read the kb article at https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/kb ... -programs/

Having experienced failure while trying to restore an image years ago using different software, I'm terrified about screwing this up. I only kinda sorta understand technical details regarding IFW, Bitlocker and making image backups in general and would like to talk through how best to proceed.

I want to back up my Windows 11 Pro laptop which has Bitlocker enabled on the drive and am looking into purchasing IFW specifically because it appears it can handle imaging the drive without me having to first unlock the drive.

I wish to make an image of my 1 TB laptop drive and put it on a 2-TB external USB drive for safekeeping. I want to make an image before installing a bunch of new software and if all goes well, make an additional image after making all those changes.

My laptop drive is encrypted with Bitlocker.
I was planning to encrypt the external USB drive using Bitlocker to Go and to enable the Auto Unlock feature for it.

Please help me to understand:
1) If I turn off Bitlocker for the laptop drive before imaging, then turn it back on after imaging, do I understand correctly it will create a new recovery key that I need to keep track of as well as take a long time to unencrypt and re-encrypt the drive? What if I "suspend" Bitlocker instead on my laptop drive? Is either unlocking of suspending Bitlocker desirable before creating the image on an external drive using IFW, and if so why?

2) If I use IFW to make a Type B backup to my external drive that is encrypted using Bitlocker to Go and back up the data in its Bitlocker encrypted state, will I be able to make a hardware-independent restore in the future? Or does the hardware-independent restoration process require that I made an image of unencrypted data, or used IFW's encryption?

3) Such an image created as in step 2 should be same size as the original. Can I create and store the TBWinRE boot media, the initial image, and then an additional image (after I've made a bunch of changes) onto the same Bitlocker-encrypted external (spinning) drive, or does the boot media need to be on a separate USB flash drive? And the second image on the external drive can be an incremental one? I know that best practice is to use an entirely separate drive, and I'm planning to do that also, but I'm asking for future reference since I bought an external drive that is bigger than the drive I am making an image of.

4) Is it going to be too complicated to have any of these files or drives encrypted at all should I have a need to restore these images? I'm just keeping them at my house or in a safe deposit box, but I'd rather not have all my data on an unencrypted drive regardless if there's a chance it could be lost or stolen.

[Brian K]

Restoring an entire disk Type A backup image (e.g. a backup of the Windows disk taken using VSS) will result in the restored partition not being encrypted even if the encrypted destination partition was unlocked. You would need to enable BitLocker on the partition to encrypt it.

I suggest you disable BitLocker on everything before you commence.