Backup to Network Shared External Drive

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I had some trouble backing up to a mapped network drive on Windows 7 64 so when it finally worked I thought I would share this to help anyone that has the same issue. I don't have a technical background so I hope this isn't too simplified.

I want to back up my documents on my Laptop over a home wireless network to a USB-connected external drive on my main PC. I had this working with ATIH2011 but would continually hang ATIH2012 when selecting the destination for the backup.
Solution:
1) Firstly, ensure that the PC connected to the USB external drive has a user name and a password (make sure it is an administrator account for the external USB drive)
2) The drive was already mapped on my laptop and had to be disconnected (unmapped)
3) Ensure the PC has a static IP address
4) Write down the IP address of the destination PC with the external drive connected to it.
5) Start Acronis and select the menu option Other Backups > File backup to backup file/s
6) Choose your files that you wish to be backed up
7) Edit the Backup name to a meaningful backup name
8) Drop down the Destination: drop down menu and click Browse...
9) Type the following in the File Name field "\\IP Address" from option 4, "\ExtDrv\folder\"
E.g. \\192.168.1.15\N - External Drive\New folder\ (I found it easier to copy and paste this)
- a) My PC has the static IP address of '192.168.1.15',
- b) The external drive is called N - External Drive, and
- c) There is a folder on the external drive called 'New folder'
10) Now, press Enter and Acronis should ask for the user name and password of the account on your PC
11) Now, type the Backup name in the File name field again and press OK

Mar, 09/06/2011 - 07:49
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Beginner
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Commenti: 6

Hi, I also do have the same problem with backing up to a NAS mapped drive. My NAS is Synology DS 1511+ and I use ATIH 2012. Can't open support ticket, because of Acronis policy customer can only open support within 30 days of purchase the force customers to pay for fixing their own bugs...

THE REAL PROBLEM:

Basic function of any backup program is to be able to backup to a network share, it's fundamental demand in the backup business. This is prohiitive that software of this caliber can't do this right and software engineers can't resolve/program correctly the basic functions of file access in Windows NT. Acronis forces to use UNC directly, but this is known to be a slower method since 1990's. That's why mapped drives have been invented. What Acronis does besides simply calling OpenFileEx() and similar native Win32 APIs?

Acronis does most probably disconnect remote drives connection/credentials when selecting destination drive dialog resulting in further browsing it invalid or unusable, so people have all this problem with "path/file invalid" and "access denied" and need to manually remap and this results in backup bypassing mapped drive designation and backing up to UNC anyway. It lists all my backups done in this way and I have no more mapped drives in the system as those disappeared after using Acronis. Acronis should not be messing with those NT APIs. I do provide/type password when connecting ad-hoc to a NAS and mapping the drive manually by myself before running Acronis main UI, so the drive is nicely present. ATIH do not need to do anything else, but I imagine you do use a Windows Service to perform actual backup and storage access and services are sensitive into the context those are run within. What we see from UI supposed to work without problem, but the service needs to authenticate on a separate level before being allowed to access network drive (depends on process credentials: LocalUser or NetworkUser in Win NT/2000/XP/2008/7). So, this is real problem, that maybe customers should configure to run Acronis Background Service to run under a user account and password designated to access the server (NAS) and its drives. It seems doing it programatically fails on Acronis engineers side as they don't prompt for a password to pass to appropriate domain APIs from within a service level!. Either software should prompt and incorporate network API usage into proper manner or ask to store network credentials on a separate tab under backup task options dialog and then pass those along with the write operations on UNC.

Thread locked as duplicate, main NAS discussion thread here.

Ven, 02/10/2012 - 04:45