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Showing posts from April, 2014

Backup to USB disks: Do-it-yourself setup for USB drive rotation / swapping

I was looking for a simple but effective solution to use external USB disk drives attached to my server for backup with backup applications that do not directly support USB drive rotation / swapping. Unfortunately, Windows does not seem to support assigning the same drive letter to different USB drives, e.g. you cannot assign the letter U: to two different USB drives. This would be nice to be able to rotate the drives but it does not work. So my idea was to use a network share name that automatically mounts different USB drives to the same share name , depending on which USB drives are connected, that creates some sort of priority as we will see. An additional advantage is that drive can be also accessed directly from other computers through the network share. The first step is to assign different drive letters to each USB disk through Windows disk management, e.g. U: and V:. Then create the same directory to be shared on each drive, e.g. "USB_SHARE". Backups will be