Not recognising NAS HDDs in TI cloning

Hi, first time post & a bit of a newbie. I have recently bought/acquired:

Dlink NAS with 2x Seagate 500Gb SATA HDD (set as 2 separate volumes Y: & Z: )
Lenovo Thinkcentre with Seagate 500 GB SATA HDD (C: same mod as NAS HDDs)
Installed Trial Version Acronis TI Home 09
Running XP Pro sp 3

My reasoning in buying 3 HDDs of same make & model was that I could clone the main (C: ) HDD on to each of the other NAS HDDs on alternating weeks. This way if my main PC HDD C: died or got a bad virus I could physically replace it with one of the HDD in the NAS & boot up as per normal on my PC.

In 'My Computer' it sees the 2 separate volumes/HDDs (Y: & Z: ) in the NAS, Y: & Z:. When I right mouse click them it does not give me the option of 'Sharing & Security...'

However in Disk Management they are not there. Also when I go to clone
in TI, I cannot see the destination Y: & Z: drives.

1/ How can I over come this?
2/ Is my reasoning for cloning correct (& will it work?) or should I just back up etc..?

 

I'm afraid I know little about NAS peculiarities but does any network attached device show up in Disk Management - they aren't local drives in the sense internals and USB connected drives are. This may well be why they don't show for cloning in TI.

On cloning. Some people do make clones as backups. I have often said from my soapbox that I think it is a waste of space since you can only have one backup in the form of a clone. You can make as many images as will fit on the target storage device. If your C drive gets up to many GB of data unless your NAS runs at a gigabit/s rate it will take a long time to clone if it can be done at all. You lose any abiltiy to run incremental or differential backups that you can do with images.

Is it really that important (are you running a computer-based business venture) that you can swap the drive quickly to get running again? In the years I've been running TI, I have only had one HD fail and it actually was still operational but had some bad sectors accummulating. That's my view but not everybody will agree.

 

Hi Seekforever, thanks for the reply. At the moment on the HDD I only have about 50gb used up of the 500gb, so space is not an issue for the forseable future. The NAS is a Dlink DNS-323 & it has a 10/100/1000 gigabit ethernet port.

 

I have the same setup, Running both WinXP SP3 and Vista 32 SP2 with 2 SATA external hdd (Buffalo hdd using Western Digital hardware) on a NAS network and ATI2009 works perfectly with both of them. I had some problems but they were related to ERUNT installed, which I have removed. Perhaps tidying up of the Network assignments in Windows and some tidying of the Drive Letter assignments in Windows will solve your problem.

 

Did you do a clone or just an image?

 

I don't think you can clone to a NAS. TI needs direct access to the drive.

 

That's what I think too. I just started TI2009 up and found the Clone command (never use it) and it only displays local drives whereas making an image the target can be any mapped drive which I am considering to be a similar situation to a NAS box.

 

Just got an email back from the tech guys for XXclone & they said a similar thing:

"XXCLONE does not support remote computers as the destination. All the source and the target volume must be "local" (physically attached to the computer including USB-disks). So, a NAS drive which behave as a networked computer is not supported by XXCLONE."

So considering that I have 2x500gb HDD for back ups (& currently only have 50gb used up on the main HDD), what would be the safest & best way to back up? I eventually intend to purchase from a retailer IT 2009, so I would have a CD disk?

 

I would just make backup images and save them to the NAS. You can store a lot of images on the NAS. If you did clone to a drive, you would only have one backup.

If you purchase the download version, you can create your own TI CD using the program or by downloading the ISO from your Acronis account. If the retail version isn't the latest build, you'll find you'll need to do this anyway.