Apologize for the long email, but wanted to give all the details. I also emailed my backup software vendor on what they recommended, which is below.

I emailed all of this to VC on their website three times, but no response. What is your advice on how I should proceed and how do you all do your full system backups with VC installed. I have another drive I could move all the data off and try restoring to that and see what happens, but I think VC will want to see some specifics of my hardware or original HDD. Then I have a big mess, which is fixable, but a long nightmare.

So I don’t know if I have reliable backups and don’t want to try and restore and have it fail. I still should be able to do that, even with VC being in place, as from what I’ve read Win & the file system act if it’s not there after I pass the bootloader with my creds. As without VC, I could browse for any file in my backups if I entered the pword correctly or if no TodoBackup encryption was used. The issue is, I have no idea if the backup is valid or not. The process took the same amount of time as ‘normal’ and I had it verify the full bck up and it found no errors.

It required I do a sector by sector backup, which I did. When I went to do a full backup with my normal software, I didn’t use their encryption option (didn’t want 2 encryption progs) and it showed my C: as empty, which it obviously was not. When I encrypted my entire drive C: (no partitions) with VC, no issues with using/loading Windows. It has it’s own encryption option that I would use, but you could only use up to a 8 character pword and their encryption method is proprietary.

I have been using EaseUSTodo Backup for years (paid subscription) as my backup software and its worked perfectly and saved me numerous times. Before I started using VC, I used no encryption. Hopefully you all can assist, as it relates to my earlier ? about updating my HDD firmware with full system disk encryption with bootloader enabled.

Teracopy portable server forum