(Answer requested by Anthony Dimpu)
Sure.
In general, drive cloning basically just hoovers up the ones and zeros from a source disk; and lays them down, unchanged and unexamined, in an exactly analogous pattern on another disk.
It doesn’t matter to the cloning software what the ones and zeros represent, or whether the data is plain or encrypted, or anything else. It’s just picking up ones and zeros from one disk, and dropping them on another.
Complications can ensue depending on the type of encryption involved: hardware-level, within the drive itself (“self-encrypting” drives); low-level software within the OS (e.g. BitLocker et al); app-level software (e.g. 7-Zip); etc.
But your question was general, so the general answer is yes: Encrypted files, folders, or entire disks can usually be safely cloned without altering the contents.
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Reader Steven Fleckenstein writes: “Cloning encrypted drives? Sometimes it works. 5 – 10 years ago when I was using a Symantec PGP encryption package you could only successfully clone the drive if the cloned drive was the same make / model of the encrypted drive and you performed a sector level clone process. I could also create a non encrypted file and folder level backup to an external drive with Acronis if Acronis was running under Windows on the encrypted drive and I selected create file and folders backup to an external drive.”
Thanks, Steve. Yep, there are many variables, depending on how the intimal encryption was handled. But there should always be *some* way to clone, copy, or backup without messing up or revealing the encrypted contents. 🙂