Will WinClone backup a Bitlocker-encrypted BootCamp partition?

Winclone
1

The BootCamp partition on my Mac is encrypted with Bitlocker. (Windows 10 Pro is the version of Windows I have installed on my BootCamp partition, in case it matters).

So, will WinClone be able to back up my BootCamp partition, even though it’s encrypted with BitLocker? Is it just a bitwise clone of a partition, or does it need to actually need to read the files on the partition?

2

Not currently. It is on our list to investigate, but for the moment, you have to disable bitlocker.

tim

3

If I have software that allows me to read BitLocker from MacOS (in particular, I have M3 BitLocker Loader) will WinClone be able to back it up?

Thanks,
L.

4

Doubtful, though I had not heard about M3 BitLocker Loader. I’ll have to investigate a bit.

tim

5

I just downloaded the trial version and it wouldn’t recognize the partition as a BootCamp partition when I tried to do a backup, even though I can read and write files to and from that partition via Finder. But, of course, the only reason I can read/write to that partition is because I have M3 BitLocker Loader running right now. Oh well…

M3 BitLocker Loader uses osxFuse in the background… Maybe that’s getting in the way of WinClone?

Thanks,
L.

6

Sounds reasonable. Does the boot camp partition even show up in Disk Utility?

tim

7

It actually does show up in Apple’s Disk Utility software, surprisingly. “disk0s3: PCI Internal Physical Volume - MS-DOS (FAT).” 79.24GB which is the correct size for my Windows partition. And if I’m in a Terminal window and I type “diskutil list” it shows on /dev/disk0 “Microsoft Basic Data, 79.2GB, disk0s3” (amongst all the other partitions on /dev/disk0, of course).

Disk Utility shows that the partition is not mounted – even though I can access the files on that partition via a mountpoint that was created by M3 BitLocker Loader when I unlocked the drive – specifically /Volumes/NO NAME. (Where does it get NO NAME from? No clue.)

So I’m guessing what’s happening is that M3 BitLocker Loader is creating a volume via osxFuse and mounting that at /Volumes/NO NAME, completely bypassing the usual MacOS disk-access routines. If I right click on the NO NAME icon (which shows up on my Desktop after I’ve unlocked it in M3 BitLocker Loader) and select Get Info from the menu, under General it says “Kind: Volume” and “Format: Unkown (osxfuse_WBL)”, which just reinforces my belief that osxFuse is bypassing the regular MacOS disk-operations stuff…

Thanks,
L.

8

thanks for sharing. From what you posted, I suspect that Winclone won’t be able to clone bitlocker volumes but I still want to do some testing. Might be good for a blog post.

tim

9

Maybe you could give the user the option of a file-backup instead of an image backup, assuming they have software that will allow MacOS to read the files on the drive. Just food for thought…

If you do create a blog post, please reply here with the link to it, if you could? I’d like to read the results of your experiments.

Thanks,
L.

10

Sure! I’ll let you know what I discover.

tim