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In the article you mention using BitLocker to encrypt flash drives and saving the recovery key to your Microsoft account. That seemed like a quick and easy thing to do, so I gave it a try and encrypted a flash drive. I then unplugged it from one machine and plugged it into another. Windows immediately recognized it as being encrypted with BitLocker and asked me for the password. I then asked it to get the recovery key from my Microsoft account, but it wasn’t there. I went back to the original machine, where I had told it to automatically mount the drive and indeed the drive quickly and automatically mounted. Again I told BitLocker to save the recovery key to my Microsoft account and again it claimed to have done so. And again, it wasn’t there. I was finally able to mount the drive on the second machine by typing in the 48 digit recovery code by hand.

Then I repeated the process with a second flash drive and everything worked flawlessly. I now have the recovery key for one drive in my Microsoft account and a second drive where BitLocker consistently and silently fails to save the key (but it will auto mount on one machine). So if you do choose to save your recovery keys in your Microsoft account it may be worthwhile to also utilize a secondary recovery key backup method.

Thanks for the suggestions. That made the difference, the backup ran to completion. It included the following less than reassuring message:
Note: The list of volumes included for backup does not include all the
volumes that contain operating system components. This backup cannot be used
to perform a system recovery. However, you can recover other items if the
destination media type supports it.

Considering that the only volume left out was the USB hard drive, and that drive is only attached to the machine for the duration of the backup, it’s not clear to me what operating system components could have been left out. I’m guessing that this is just an artifact of not including the “-allCritical” parameter.

I have a second, theoretically identical machine, that backed up without a hitch. Clearly they’re not completely identical.

Time for me to investigate those alternative backup tools.

Thanks. Uninstall and not reinstall seems like the easiest way to keep from running into this error.