Cannot backup to network drive

gcd00

I have a small network set up at home consisting of a desktop PC running XP Home edition and a laptop with Vista Ultimate. Also on the network is a 500GB external hard drive which is attached to the XP machine. I can see the external drive from the Vista laptop and I can read its contents. I have also added folders remotely and deleted files for test purposes. There is about 450 GB of free space on this drive.
I would like to perform a complete backup of the Vista laptop to this external drive using the backup and restore facility in Vista Ultimate. When this option is selected, it goes searching for potential backup locations and then throws out a hard drive option which is empty and a DVD option. In other words, it cannot see the remote external drive. Could this be some kind of permissions issue even though I seem to have read/write access to the external drive from the my network share. I know from reading around the forums a bit that you cannot assign individual permissions due to the fact that "simple file sharing" cannot be turned off on windows XP home.
Can someone please suggest a fix for this or if not - a suitable workaround?

vibe666

i think it might be that your backup software is limited to backing data up locally and cannot back up data to a network drive, so it's not 'seeing' it as it's not designed to.

you might be able to get around it using symlinks (although i don't know if you can use them with a network share), or an app that will allow you to create a local disk from a network share.

ideally, if your network drive supports iSCSI you could create an iSCSI LUN on the network drive and mount that in windows on your PC which will appear as a local disk.

or you could use some free backup tool that allows you to backup to network shares.

Torqay

No can do with network drives. Get a decent backup software or use this workaround.

vibe666

Torqay wrote: »

No can do with network drives. Get a decent backup software or use this workaround.

you just keep swooping in to take all the glory don't you?!

Torqay

vibe666 wrote: »

you just keep swooping in to take all the glory don't you?!

Is it that obvious?

Nah, just happened to know that "Backup & Restore" in Vista doesnt work with network drives (and contrary to common belief it still doesn't work properly in Windows 7).

It's a gimmick like Calc and Draw. MS trying to be the Jack of all trades and yet they have turned out to be the master of none. Plenty good (and free) alternatives available that will do the job much better.

gcd00

Thanks a bunch guys, should have logged onto forum before before spending the whole morning surfing. I did find the article below eventually (although I'd be more inclined to go with Torqay on the Windows 7 observation):

On the same subject - is there anything stopping me physically attaching the external drive to the vista ultimate laptop I want to backup and performing a complete backup in this way using backup and restore center?

Limitations

Windows Backup does not support tape drives.[7] It also does not support backing up to or restoring from a subfolder of a disk; instead, it creates subfolders of its own.[8] Backup and Restore can only make a system image of disks with NTFS file system. If the system image is to be saved on a USB flash drive, it must be formatted with NTFS file system.[9]
The version of Windows Backup supplied with Windows Server 2008 does not support hard disk drives with large sector sizes (4096 bytes) unless they support 512 byte emulation.[10]
URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Backup_and_Restore&action=edit&section=5"]edit[/URL Differences in Windows editions

The features included in Backup and Restore may differ depending on the edition of Windows. Only Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Enterprise or Ultimate editions can schedule automatic backups or back up files and folders to a network location. Only Windows Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate editions support Complete PC Backup.[11]
Another notable limitation of the Backup and Restore Center in Windows Vista is that it does not allow users to specify individual files or folders to be backed up or skipped, it only allows users to choose file type categories (based on MIME type, application association, and file extension) such as documents, music, videos etc. This limitation has been removed in Windows 7.[12]
In Windows Vista, a Complete PC Backup could not be performed to a network location. Windows 7 allows performing a full system image backup to a network location However, subsequent incremental system image backups cannot be performed to a network;[5] all image based backups to the network must be full backups. Full system image backups to local or removable storage can be incremental.
For Windows 7, file backup to a network share is available only with Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions whereas it was included in Windows Vista Home Premium.[13][14] Manual image-based full system backup (including incremental backup) can be done on local or removable media in Windows 7 Home Premium. Full system backup to a network also requires Windows 7 Professional or above editions.

vibe666

gcd00 wrote: »

On the same subject - is there anything stopping me physically attaching the external drive to the vista ultimate laptop I want to backup and performing a complete backup in this way using backup and restore center?

no, nothing at all stopping you from doing that if the drive has a USB connection and this would actually be the quickest way to do it if you have the option.