VMProtect backup to USB drive which is attached to the host
Can someone please tell me how to make my USB drive visiable, which is attached to the host,
for selection as the destination of my backup?

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Just making sure this is the same issue I am having.
I have a usb drive mounted to the physical ESX host where the virtual Acronis appliance resides and I wish to backup to this drive. When I go to browse this host in the web tool for my destination backup, I get an error about the following:
Message: An error has occurred while getting directories for path: 'avfs:/smb?//myhostname'.
Is the reason why I am getting this error related to the comment above about no support for USB drives, or is this because I have a separate issue?
Shouldn't I be able to at least backup to the host's local disks, regardless of having the USB drive mounted?
Thanks in advance...
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Was this feature added as promised? Can VMProtect 7 back up to a usb hard drive attached to the physical host?
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As far as I know it is not possible to use a USB drive directly attached to the host. There are 2 workarounds to this:
1. Attach the USB drive to a Windows operating system (either a guest VM or physical machine) and install the vmProtect Windows agent. When using a guest VM the speed is very slow (under 10mb/sec, as ESXi has very slow USB 2.0 performance). On a physical machine it should be very fast.
2. Run a Windows guest on ESXi and passthough the USB controller to the VM. This way the guest VM has direct access to the USB drive and the speed will be very fast. The drawback is that you cannot snapshot or use vmProtect (which isn't a big deal if it only does backups, and you could use Windows backup internally for the VM).
If you are booting ESXi from a USB key or are otherwise using the USB ports on the server, be careful which USB controller you passthrough. The first time I did this, I passed-through the USB controller that the ESXi USB key was on, and this resulted in no access to the USB key after boot, which prevented any of my ESXi configuration changes from saving. I had to reinstall ESXi on the USB key in order to fix this problem (not a huge deal if you know the config).
Currently I am using method 1, as the backup times are not too bad since they are incremental. I am looking into backing up to a SAN, which will eliminate the USB issues altogether.
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