The original thoughts behind the NAS system was to backup at all the important documents automatically offsite. I stumbled across a neat program called CrashPlan that allows you to automatically backup offsite to somebody you know for practically nothing.....very cool. (http://www.crashplan.com).
Anyway, got the demo installed and got my Dad to install it on his PC. I setup CrashPlan on my Vista machine to allow him to backup to my internal RAID5 array, easy. He was trying to setup CrashPlan on his WinXP machine to allow me to backup to his external Maxtor Shared Storage NAS drive (which he had mapped as a Z: or something)....Problem was that CrashPlan couldn't see the drive!
After a few emails to tech support, I found out that CrashPlan runs as the SYSTEM user and can't see Mapped Network Drives created by users.
To get around this, I had to figure out how to map a drive as the SYSTEM user. With the help of my friend the Internet, I was able to cobble the following together:
1. Run the following to schedule a command prompt session as the SYSTEM user at HH:mm
C:\> AT
(found here: http://shijaz.com/windows/Using_SYSTEM_user_context.htm)
2. Map the network drive using the 'net use' command.
C:\> net use Z: \\192.168.x.x\folder /PERSISTENT:YES
(more details here: http://www.cezeo.com/tips-and-tricks/net-use-command/)
UPDATED: This works well until the first reboot when the 'PERSISTENT' didn't work as well as I'd hoped. Looks like this is on hold till I can find a way to run a batch file as the SYSTEM user on startup.
UPDATED2: He gave up on the network drive idea and he's just going to use an external HDD to store my backups.
2 comments:
This worked for me: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/how_to/back_up_windows_mapped_drives
CrashPlan is aware of the issue and appears to be working on it. They've figured out a workaround. The link from cu_shane is broken.
Here is my experience getting it to work:
http://scandalon.com/2009/09/mapped-drive-for-crashplan-as-windows-service/
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