How to copy from one BitLocker external drive to another?

[chileverde]

I have a few external drives which I use for different purposes, for which I could like to have a backup drive ready to go if I need it (rather than having an image I would need to restore). All are BitLocker encrypted.

All my experience using IFW has been with Backup and Restore. I haven't used the Copy function until today.

I tried copying one flash drive to another. (The destination drive is much larger than the origin drive, if that makes a difference.) I selected Validate Byte-for-Byte and Read from Windows. The operation aborted because Validate Byte-for-Byte found errors. After the aborted attempt, the destination flash drive was still BitLocker-encrypted, but I couldn't use it. Disk Management shows Unknown file system. I tried to re-format, got a warning I will lose BitLocker encryption, so I guess I will reformat and encrypt again. Since the amount of data on the flash drive is small, I might just use Windows to copy in the future, but I thought IFW might be more accurate—is that true?

But the other pair of drives I want to maintain as copies are each 1 TB (SSD drives) with about 750 GB of data. What is the best way to copy all the data from one BitLocker-encrypted drive to another BitLocker-encrypted drive, without having to re-encrypt? Can I use Copy to do that or do I need to make a BU and then restore the BU? My past experience restoring an image BU to an unlocked BitLocker drive has been in TBWinRE, usually restoring C:, so I couldn't do it in Windows. But in this case, if you recommend Backup and Restore to accomplish copying, can I do it in Windows? Do I use Validate Byte-for-Byte when doing the backup but not for the Restore?

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

I haven't tried that exact scenario, but pretty sure the partitions would need to be locked and PHYLock would need to be used to have a chance of working. You would also likely want to change signature/GUIDs in the copy so Windows doesn't put it offline. This type of copy will be everything since it will be seen as encrypted (1TB of data, in this case).

Because certain data areas are completely blocked, you're going to have validate byte-for-byte errors if you try a copy (or backup & restore) of the partition using an unlocked source and unlocked destination. However, in some cases it may work without the validation, but you wouldn't have that confirmation.