How can i use bitlocker to encrypt windows server backup usb drives

Question

Hi,

I have a windows 2022 server and i use windows server backup to backup to a couple of usb dedicated backup drives that we alternate.

How can i encrypt those drives. As they are dedicated drives for wsb they cant be seen in bitlocker to encrypt them?.

Answer 1

Hello Jason Gough (jason.gough),

thank you for posting on the Microsoft Community Forums.

Based on the description, I understand that your issue is related to Windows Server Backup.

Since there are no engineers dedicated to Windows Server Backup in this forum. In order to be able to deal with your questions quickly and efficiently, I recommend that you repost your questions in the Q&A forum, where there will be a dedicated engineer to provide you with a professional and effective response.

Here is a link to the Q&A forum: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/

Have a nice day.

Best regards,

Lei

Answer 2

If you have BitLocker support enabled in the OS, you should right-click on the USB drive in Explorer to turn on BitLocker. If you do not get that option, the BitLocker feature has not been added to the Server OS or your current partition on the drive is unsupported. If you know the feature is already enabled, try to repartition the USB drive in Windows Server 2022 as a simple volume and see if you can turn on BitLocker. After that, attempt to perform a Windows Server Backup to the drive. If backups refuse to start you may need to auto-unlock the drive or temporarily suspend BitLocker during the backup process. The alternative to software encryption like BitLocker is dedicated hardware-encrypted USB drives.

Answer 3

Hi,

The issue is that when you use Windows server backup to run a scheduled full backup of the server it wants to format the drive for exclusive use as a backup drive. In doing so the system no longer sees the drive by a drive letter. So even that I know that Bitlocker is working fine it cant encrypt the drive once Windows backup has done it.

So how can I run scheduled full backups of the server whilst using bitlocker on the drives?.

Answer 4

I recommend adding an internal drive or partition big enough to facilitate the backup. Schedule a task to start the backup to this internal drive. Once the local backup is complete, have another task Robocopy that backup to your BitLocker-encrypted external drive. I do not recall continuous formatting being required to perform Windows Server backups that are manually purged. However, the backup task may need to be scripted to bypass such a requirement. My tasks were not created in the wizard and my backups are local to a subdirectory.

Answer 5

So are we saying that there is no way to use a scheduled windows server backup full backup direct to a drive that is encrypted via bitlocker?.