Help. I'm Lost

I am trying to get a home network set up for maintaining backups of 3 computers. It is a wireless network to which I have attached a NAS box with 2-2TB drives in Raid 1 configuration. On the NAS I have created a folder for each of the computers I want to back up. This is a wireless network with the NAS connected to the wireless router.

I purchased Paragon Backup and Recovery Suite 10 so that I could do either disc image or file backup. The folders created on the NAS show up in My Computer as Network Locations (running Vista Ultimate). I went through the map network drive process and the addresses are network locations (192.168.1.xxx) and folder names. I have been moving some photo files to the NAS with no problems whatsoever. However, I can not figure a way to tell the backup software to put the disc image to that network location. Am I trying to do the impossible?

I tried to set up the NAS as an FTP server and this worked for transferring the disc image (had I left it going long enough to get the image completely transferred---it was PAINFULLY slow in the write process - 3hrs for 25G in about 3G files). Is this my only option?

If so, I will need to be reevaluating the entire process. Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this (good or bad).

 

Is answering your own post like talking to yourself? I think so.

My frustrations about the painfully slow write speeds became clear to me today (sometimes the density of my thinking is hard to believe). The write speed was limited by the "choke" I was working through - my wireless network....DUHHH. I purchased another external USB drive so that I could create a disk image from each of the computers quickly by a direct connection. After creating it on the portable drive, I can copy it to my NAS for long term backup. I am now experimenting with using a network connection to create differential backups and am hoping that they will be workable through the network (smaller size resulting in faster creation directly on the NAS).

The question about the network drive not being visible in B&R Suite 10 still puzzles me. I have been able to map a share folder using the map network drive dialog within B&R Suite 10. But I still cannot even see the mapped drives as shown on the My Computer screen in Vista. I am now suspecting that it has something to do with how I have defined/created the network connections within Vista. I installed the B&R Suite 10 software on my wife's computer and the NAS (and its folders) is clearly visible and can be selected from within the program. Her machine is running Windows 7. And, I did nothing special when setting things up on that machine.

 

1. Backup to FTP may be slower than direct backup to NAS because of FTP settings.

2. If mapped drives are not shown in B&R it usually means that UAC blocks access. Try to disable UAC:
* Go to Start Menu -> Control Panel -> User Accounts and Family Safety -> User Account.
* Click on User Account Control settings link.
* Slide the slider bar to the lowest value (towards Never Notify), with description showing Never notify me.
* Click OK to make the change effective.
* Restart the computer to turn off User Access Control.

3. Copy vs Backup Image\Archive:

Copy means that all partition\disk structure will be placed to the target drive as new partition. If you want to get Hard Disk Copy it will wipe all data on target and place copy of the source HDD there.
As a result you will get clone of source HDD\partition.
+ Copy could not be made to NAS, only to physical drive.

Backup is special compressed file which contains all data from the source HDD\partition + information about HDD\partition structure (size, file system, etc).
It could be placed to any mounted\physical volume and will not wipe data on target.
+ It could be password protected and can't be accidentally modified or corrupted (like a copy can)

 

Thanks for your reply Mech_An.

With regard to #1, I have decided that I will no longer try to make disc image backups over the wireless network (I think this was a major cause of the slow write speeds to the NAS drives). I am still experimenting with doing differential backups using the network, however.

With regard to #2, you are absolutely correct. The computer I was unable to see the shared network folders on is running Vista. After I followed your instructions and turned off UAC (with Vista you don't have the slider like Windows 7), ALL of the shared folders on the NAS became visible and could be selected as locations for backup.

With regard to #3, my thanks for your clarification of meanings of copy/backup. I have a Raid 1 setup in a computer that has degraded because of drive errors (one of the drives is fine and the computer is still usable). One of my goals for B&R is to make a "clone" of the good drive, eliminate the Raid array (believe this to be hardware Raid as it indicates an Intel Raid Controller is on board), and then restore the disk drive "clone" with the end result being a "normal/non-Raid drive" computer. From your explanation, it appears that I will need to make a "copy" rather than backup. Will I still need to create a recovery disk? I'm sure I will have further questions when the time for actually trying what I want to try gets near.

Thanks for all your help.