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Our tape drive unit is broken and we would like to buy an external hard drive as a temporary backup solution.

Will windows backup work with an external network storage?

Is it capable of backing up let say 400 GB to a network hard drive which I can take home and have an offsite backup. I'm afraid it's too large and the speed would be too slow.

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It's not really offsite unless it's permanently off-site. –  dlamblin Dec 8 '09 at 2:23
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migrated from superuser.com Dec 8 '09 at 5:42


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I'd be hesitant to dump 400GB into an NTBackup backup, but:

  • There's a fair chance that your current backup software can also generate a backup to a file location. Odds are that you won't end up with a single monstrously large file, and it'll do those little things like compression.
  • If the destination is on a network drive and the backup is running scheduled, you'll need to be sure that the backup runs as an account with network access (e.g. not a local System account).
  • Using your regular backup software may make it easier to encrypt your backup if it supports that. Arguably less critical for tapes since it's less likely that someone's going to just plug them into a USB port and read the contents, but still very important. What's the cost of losing an unencrypted backup? What's the cost of notifying affected people that their information was lost?
  • You need to be careful about what you're backing up and how. If you go with something simple (like robocopy), you may also still need to use NTBackup (dump system state, back up Exchange) or a database maintenance plan or backup script (dump database, then back up the dump file)

There are some likely relevant items over on ServerFault.com, try the Windows and Backup tags combined

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