Endpoint Encryption

Is there a recommended piece of software to create and restore an image of a hard drive that has been encrypted using Endpoint Encryption 11?

I have been using Symantec Ghost for several years with unencrypted drives, but using Ghost with an encrypted drive will only allow me to make an image of the complete drive. This clearly means that the image is much larger than it needs to be, and takes a significant time to create and restore.

I have found some backup software, Casper Secure Drive Backup (http://www.fssdev.com/products/caspersecure/), that is compatible with Encryption Desktop v10 and earlier, but it is not compatible with Endpoint Encryption v11.

Does anyone have any recommendations of software that can make drive images that have been encrypted? It is allowable for the software to run within Windows 7, and for the backup image to be unencrypted if necessary.

Many thanks for any help.

Nick

There is no supported backup solution to create an encryptyed drive image, but most standard backup solutions will work.  Nearly any backup solution that runs within Windows will give you a non-encrypted backup. In most cases, as the files are read/accessed to be backed up by the software, they are decrypting on the fly.

What is your objective here?  Are you trying to create an image to deploy other systems?  If that is the case, then it is a moot point.  Symantec Endpoint Encryption is not supported for imaging purposes of an encrypted system.  An image can be taken before encryption begins, but once encryption begins a machine UUID is generated for communication with the server.  An image after that would cause all systems to have the same UUID, and cause countless problems.

If you want to make a single backup of the encrypted drive to potentially restore onto the same system, you would need to do a sector-by-sector copy with something like Clonezilla.  The resulting image could potentially be the size of the entire drive, since it is just copying every bit on the drive.