WD Wireless Pro Bitlocker SD Card not backing up

I’ve applied Bitlocker encryption to my Passport Wireless Pro (2TB) and now the auto SD card backup does not work.
To be able to write to the drive my work requires any drive to have Bitlocker enabled, so switching it off is difficult.
I plug in the card and the lights start flashing one, two, three, four and then drive spins down, in the past this would have meant the transfer was complete.
When I open the SD card imports folder the recent backup is not there.
Anyone with some useful advice would be great.
If I can’t use Bitlocker then I’m happy to reset the drive to factory default or reformat, which I assume won’t affect the WD software.
Any advice gratefully received.
Thank you.

If I switch off BitLocker the auto SD card backup works again. It’s frustrating as it means I can’t write to the laptop (due to security settings that allow on BitLocker enabled USB device to be writable), but at least I will be able to create backups direct from the cards.

Hi there. I was just browsing through these posts and yours was interesting to me.

You mentioned that you enabled BitLocker encryption on the HDD - I can only assume that you did this via your PC while connected to the Wireless Pro via USB cable. I don’t recall there being any encryption feature on the Wireless Pro out of the box.

The Wireless Pro is running its own operating system (a lean version of Linux, or is it Unix?), and the “Copy Card” is a feature of the OS. If the HDD is encrypted, the Wireless Pro OS simply cannot read or write from it because that OS does NOT have any way to decrypt/encrypt like you do on your PC. So you can probably read/write to that disk all day long via USB from your PC, but that built-in OS is useless, and you effectively have a very expensive USB HDD.

(if anyone finds that I’ve misspoken, please chime in)

Assuming you remove Bitlocker encryption, it should work normally again. I suppose you could still copy protected archive files, but the HDD itself can’t be encrypted. Just a thought.

All that said, there are some efforts out there to, ahem, “enhance” the WD My Passport Wireless Pro to add certain features or in same cases fix bugs that WD hasn’t yet addressed in their formal updates (it’s a 'nix system so it’s fairly easy to do for those who have experience with such things). It is possible there is a custom firmware (OS) out there that provides the capability for the system to read/write encrypted drives.

P.S. - Regarding System Restore - the OS is stored and executed from an on-board NAND chip, NOT the HDD - it will actually still boot even if you remove the drive. So no, a System Restore will not affect the WD software. It will, however, remove everything from the drive, including any of the bundled software and example media files that shipped with the drive. Those things may already be long-gone in your case, depending on what you had to do to enable Bitlocker in the first place. My suggestion would be to use the Passport’s built-in restore function (rather than reformat on your PC). This way it gets properly allocated and formatted ExFAT.

Hope this helps (and that I didn’t mis-speak!)