Backing up an encrypted drive?

[Technique]

You'll have to bare with me as encryption is new to me (I'm using Veracrypt), so for my little mind at least there's 2 approaches:

 

1) Encrypt the entire drive

2) Encrypt a file on the drive & just mark that as a huge file.

 

I've tried it (#1) out on a portable drive and whenever i connected it it would ask me to format the drive. Obviously not a good thing if you click yes in error.

I suppose another way would be to on a 2TB hard drive for example, set a file to be just under 2TB so that it doesn't trigger that formatting option.

 

My question is really about backing up the encrypted drive. 

So let's say I went with approach #1. The entire drive is encrypted. But in case the encryption is/goes bad or just for simple making copies of a copy, how do you actually back up that encrypted disk?

 

I've used Macrium & Acronis in the past to do my backups. Do you just set it to copy the drive and then your backup will be a perfect copy - insert that new drive and you'll have to mount it etc like you would the original, or do you have to decrypt your drive first and then copy as 'normal'? Only issue then is you would then need to encrypt again I imagine.

 

Just wondering how it works, how to do it?