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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

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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

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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 Commented Aug 6, 2014 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. Commented Aug 6, 2014 at 18:58
  • But check this discussion superuser.com/questions/357212/… Commented Aug 6, 2014 at 18:58
  • What I read from 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? Commented Aug 6, 2014 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. Commented Aug 6, 2014 at 19:03

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