Build 11639 - Are Backups to Mapped Network Drives Different?
First of all, I know its better to use UNC paths instead of mapped network drives for the path to a vault. But, there's a bug in Backup and Recovery 10 that prevents you from being able to point to a Linux SMB share using UNC paths when you're running Backup and Recovery on a Windows 7 machine. Acronis Quality Assurance is on the case, but I don't have much faith that they'll fix it anytime soon.
So, I'm trying to come up with a decent workaround, using mapped drives instead of UNC paths to SMB shares.
Generally, its a big, big pain to use mapped network drives. This is because network drives that are mapped to your user account generally aren't visible to Acronis (which runs as a different user). To even create a backup plan, I first had to mount the network drive in a command line window with administrative rights (right-click on cmd.exe and run-as-administrator). Then I would have to mount the drive using the "net use" command. Mapping a drive that way lets Acronis access it.
The problem is, if you map a drive this way it won't map itself again when you reboot. So, if you have a scheduled backup plan, it won't work. The workaround is to create a batch file that mounts the drive to the same path that you used before when you mounted it at the admin command line. Then you set that batch file up as a pre-command that runs before a backup begins. That will mount the drive so Acronis can see it, and let the backup proceed. It's a little buggy though. It helped a lot to add a pause to the batch file after the "net use" command. The easiest way to do this is to ping the localhost 5 times or so (that creates a 5 second pause).
Anyways, this is annoying to do, and sometimes backups fail. I read in the release notes for build 11639 that "Backup to a mapped drive does not require the user to be logged on." I'm not really sure what this means, but its a little surprising, because usually applications can't backup to mapped network drives unless they're running as a logged-in user. I'm hoping that this means that there's some easiest way of backing up to mapped network drives, but I don't know what it is. As far as I can tell, the new build works exactly the same as before.
Does anyone have any ideas why my (attempted0 incremental backup ended up being a full backup (and why it didn't use the right name)?
Hello Andrew,
Thank you for posting, I will be happy to help.