How to get an external drive backed up
June 12, 2007 9:41 AM Subscribe
I use Carbonite to backup my home machine, and recently purchased an external hard drive. Carbonite does not backup external hard drives (as I found out after the fact), so I am trying to find a way to make Carbonite think that the external drive is just another folder off of my C: drive. Is this possible?
Lifehacker posted an article today that might be of interest. You can read it here. They use this setup to do the exact opposite but I bet you can adapt it to your purposes if sanko's method doesn't work out.
posted by KevCed at 11:15 AM on June 12, 2007
posted by KevCed at 11:15 AM on June 12, 2007
Windows' support for mount points is fraught with gotchas; you'll probably want to keep the existing drive letter, as well as mounting the partition somewhere else.
Something I recently found out to my chagrin, after dreaming up an oh-so-elegant way to set up Windows boxes that involved using BartPE to mount a second partition as "C:\Documents and Settings", is that Windows Explorer won't let you put folders from a mounted partition into the Recycle Bin. Spoiled my whole day. Files, on the other hand, delete just fine.
Also: you need to go to somewhat heroic lengths to stop the directory you use as a mount point being deleted or becoming non-empty. Some Windows components (I'm still not exactly sure which ones) are slack about reparse points, and will do violence to mount points if they are able; you end up with a non-empty local directory and a disconnected mount. What I generally do, after setting up the mount, is delete its inherited NTFS permissions, add a Read and Execute permission for Everyone on This Folder Only, and change the owner to Administrator (not Administrators, and not SYSTEM). As long as I don't run things as Administrator, it will then stay safely empty.
posted by flabdablet at 4:22 PM on June 12, 2007
Something I recently found out to my chagrin, after dreaming up an oh-so-elegant way to set up Windows boxes that involved using BartPE to mount a second partition as "C:\Documents and Settings", is that Windows Explorer won't let you put folders from a mounted partition into the Recycle Bin. Spoiled my whole day. Files, on the other hand, delete just fine.
Also: you need to go to somewhat heroic lengths to stop the directory you use as a mount point being deleted or becoming non-empty. Some Windows components (I'm still not exactly sure which ones) are slack about reparse points, and will do violence to mount points if they are able; you end up with a non-empty local directory and a disconnected mount. What I generally do, after setting up the mount, is delete its inherited NTFS permissions, add a Read and Execute permission for Everyone on This Folder Only, and change the owner to Administrator (not Administrators, and not SYSTEM). As long as I don't run things as Administrator, it will then stay safely empty.
posted by flabdablet at 4:22 PM on June 12, 2007
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posted by sanko at 9:53 AM on June 12, 2007