Can I clone a full encrypted external onto a bigger drive and it unlock with my password?

[Pennywise024]

I hope my profile doesn't catch fire or anything when I mention that this is an apple encryption on my 250GB Seagate Momentus 5400, but here we go.

So I have recently started to compile all of the data I have scattered through various drives and DVD's in order to make a few backup drives to avoid situations I am about to explain. I was going to have an "active" drive that I push stuff to on the regular and then two Platter drives to store info for bad days. What actually prompted this was the rebuild of my PC and the HDD in my iMac had a bad sector and was on its way to target practice town. So I moved everything to a single drive and deleted some of the data from the original places and rebuilt the PC and upgraded my 2011 iMac.

After a good run in with ADD I got back to this project and since I had been pushing data to the active drive and had not made the backups yet, I filled my active 250GB encrypted drive to 249.72GB and now it will not unlock. If I input my password correctly it accepts it and thinks for a few minutes and asks for it again. If its wrong it just asks again for the password. I thought it was corrupted at first and ran disk utility on my mac and it didn't find any errors. Thats when I saw how full it was. I tried on my MacBook and my PC to open the drive with the same results on all three.

So my question is as stated in the header. Can I clone it onto a bigger drive and still use the password to unlock it? If I am not misinformed, the encryption needs a little space on the HDD to do its whole decrypt thing. Why I encrypted in the first place is beyond me, maybe I watched a Bond movie that night and was like "I can be like a spy and have encrypted files". Go me.

 

[popatim]

Honestly I don't know the answer but I see no reason why it wouldn't. I'm certainly not a Mac guy.. LOL
The nice thing is that you can try this and it won't hurt the original drive/data one bit. The clone should be a sector clone rather then a file type and since I'm not a Mac guy I can't recommend what software to use for that. I'm sure someone will chime in with exactly what you need.

 

[mjslakeridge]

I've seen a lot of crazy things on this forum, and this ranks up there. I'm not a MAC guy either, but what you suggested is worth a try. (You know James Bond is just a character in a book/movie)?

 

[Ralston18]

In agreement with the other posted responses...

A clone, by definition, is the same as the original.

If your software application accurately clones "Drive X" to "Drive Y" then yes.

However, since "Mr. Murphy" is always lurking about just be sure to do a confirmed backup before any cloning attempts. And verify the backup.

You never know what some buggy software may do......

 

[aquielisunari]

In short, yes.

 

[ArtPog]

1. I don't think anyone can tell you with any degree of certainty whether you will be able or unable to decrypt your presently encrypted data following a successful disk-cloning operation to a larger-capacity drive. I'm sure you understand that.

2. I only wanted to comment re the disk-cloning program itself and mention that not every d-c program has the capability of cloning an encrypted drive to another drive. The program we use routinely - Casper, for example, does not contain that capability; the data contents of the "source" disk must be decrypted before the program will undertake a d-c operation.

3. I do believe, however, that there are other d-c programs that do possess that capability. I believe, but am not absolutely certain, that the Macrium Reflect program possesses that capability. And no doubt there are others, but I'm not familiar enough with them re this issue. And it's entirely possible that while their "freebie" version doesn't possess the capability, perhaps their commercial version does.

4. Hopefully someone will come along and respond to your query who has had ACTUAL PERSONAL EXPERIENCE with this issue and suggest the specific program you need. Good luck.

 

[mjslakeridge]

Good points ^^^. Per this article Acronis True Image can clone and restore bitlocker encrypted drives, if done outside of Windows (using the ATI bootable media). I don't know about Apple encryption.

https://kb.acronis.com/content/56619

 

[Pennywise024]

So I tried a Carbon Copy Cloner and it would not even see the encrypted drive, which is what I figured. I talked to my IT guys at work about it and he suggested I talk to apple about their encryption to see if there is anything I can do and to make sure it doesn't go into some kind of burn down mode if it tries to get copied. Apple suggested the genius bar of coarse, but they tried a few things with their apple magic command keys and it still didn't work.

I did stumble upon a cloning dock from Inatek that will offline clone. I have successfully cloned the info over to a larger drive, but it created a partition the same size drive I cloned from sooooo its pretty much the same deal lol. I might not have had the same file format set up on the new drive as the old one, thats all that I could come up with on why it would block off the same size instead of just cloning over. Also i could just do it that way. I tried to expand it in disk utility(Macs Disk management) and on Windows 10 Disk management to no avail.

I will continue to try and clone it, possible talk to Inatek about the partitioning thing and maybe Samsung to see if anything can be done. I will post results if people are still interested, hopefully ill get my data back lol.

 

[guest_999]

http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/