Backing up a Bitlocked Drive (Theoretical)

So I'm beginning to use Bitlocker on my PC, but I'm a little confused as how to I would back this thing up. I'm used to creating full disk images and storing those offboard in an external hard drive, but now that I think of it, I think a full disk image of this drive would now be under Bitlocker encryption as well. I might be wrong, I'm not totally sure on how Bitlocker does its thing and/or whether it affects my imaging software (I use Macrium Reflect Free, by the way).

In the past, when I needed to recover at the point where couldn't get access to the original hardware configuration (i.e. crash, hardware upgrade), I have been able to just mount my image, dig into it, seize permissions of my user folder, and pull everything out of there. If it is Bitlocked, I would assume that I need to download the entire thing to another hard drive, attach it to a PC running Windows, unlock that via my recovery key, and then rip everything out of it? I'm hesitant to try that out, so I was wondering if anyone else had any idea.

 

Bitlocker only protects the data on the internal local drive where it is enabled. In other words, when you backup to say an external drive it is decrypted. Bitlocker can be enabled on the external backup device but it provides a different type of encryption, i.e, doesn't require a TPM or USB key, it uses a separate user defined password key.

 

Here's some links W7, W8/8.1:

BitLocker Drive Encryption Step-by-Step Guide for Windows 7

BitLocker Frequently Asked Questions W8/8.1(FAQ)