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I have an external hard drive which I use for backups of a Windows 7 Professional system. I already used Windows Backup to make an initial backup of approx 400 GB of data on that drive when it was directly connected via USB (mounted as E:\). Now I want to move this USB device to a machine on the network and continue making incremental backups over the network. I would like to keep the initial full backup and add incremental backups to it because backing up over my network is very slow.

My questions are: Is there a way to tell Windows Backup, that the location has changed? Can I switch location from a directly connected USB drive to a network share? Will the initial full backup be used as a base for incremental backups? Can I verify that saved data is not corrupted by changing the location?

Thanks

justfortherec
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Windows can put incremental backups only on local drives. That means that you can only save full backups on network shares

strange walker
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  • Oh, that's unfortunate. I didn't know that. Do you know if it works if I map a network drive to a drive letter? Do you have a link with more information? Thanks – justfortherec Aug 06 '14 at 18:53
  • no, that wont work either. iSCSI attached disk will do, but thats a hell of work for such task. Unfortunately i dont have exact link - that topic was part of my microsot training. – strange walker Aug 06 '14 at 18:58
  • But check this discussion http://superuser.com/questions/357212/automatic-incremental-backups-to-a-network-drive-windows – strange walker Aug 06 '14 at 18:58
  • What I read from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/back-up-files#1TC=windows-7, incremental backups seem to work on network locations: "If you're saving your backups on [...] network location, Windows Backup will create a new, full backup for you automatically _when needed_." Is my understanding wrong? – justfortherec Aug 06 '14 at 18:58
  • you can schedule backup to network share, yes. And it will work. But each time it will create new full backup and overwrite existing one. – strange walker Aug 06 '14 at 19:03
  • AFAIK the incremental backup is supported on network shares, what is not supported is the versionning. – PierU Oct 19 '22 at 11:35