Windows 7 Backup to NAS

I have Windows 7 Home Premium and was thinking of upgrading to Professional so I can use the builtin backup feature to backup to a network drive. Problem is my network drive is on a DD-WRT router, so the drive is formatted ext3 and shared via Samba. I can browse to the drive in explorer, but I thought I read somewhere that windows 7 backup requires drives to be NTFS. Will I be able to backup to this network drive? I don't want to spend the $100 to upgrade if I do and still cant use the network backup.

Welcome to the forums bdresch

Instead of spending $100 on the upgrade to Windows 7 Pro, why not spend that on getting some really good backup software instead? The Windows Backup does a decent job for a built-in solution, but it's nowhere near as flexible as a 3rd party option like Acronis. There are even some free solutions which may do what you are after.

If you let us know the requirements for your backup software and we may be able to point you in the right direction. For example, do you need full image backups, incremental backups, etc...

Here's the Acronis website for you to have a browse of : http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/

I mainly just want to backup my libraries so I have a copy of my music, documents, and pictures. I don't think I have a need for incremental backups. I just want the backups to be automatic and not have to deal with it once I get it setup. I had Syncback on my last computer, but wanted to use the windows backup so I didn't have to have another program running. I know the $100 for the Pro upgrade is probably more than I would spend on 3rd party software, but I could also see some value in having the XP mode and the remote desktop client which I had used a few times with XP Pro in the past. I would rather just spend the $100 right now and have the rest of the Pro features for the future but don't want to spend the $100 now and then have to spend more for 3rd party backupsoftware if Windows 7 backup doesn't let me backup to the NAS drive.

Fair enough I don't see why the Windows 7 backup software wouldn't work with your NAS - it has a "save on a network" option which you should be able to use to browse to your NAS. That said, I've not used that particular NAS so I don't want to assume it will work (it works fine with my QNAP NAS). I know that it wouldn't work with non NTFS drives in Vista (because of Volume Shadow Copy I guess).

You could install the 90-day trial and see if the backup does what you are after before purchasing the Pro version:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/e.../cc442495.aspx

Are your NAS drives formatted NTFS?

They are also formatted EXT3... however, they are mounted via the MS Networking file service and the NAS appears as standard Windows shares. Your NAS may behave differently when mounted, hence my hesitation . I see no reason why it wouldn't work, but I wouldn't want to give you a "guarantee" as I've not tested that configuration.

IC. Well I have a friend with Pro on a laptop, so maybe I'll have to see if he can stop by to try it. Thanks for the help.

Another question about the Windows Backup. If I backup just my libraries, are they on the backup drive in some form that I can access them from a different computer? Or are they in some type of zipped form that isn't readily accessed?

You should be able to access and restore them from any Windows 7 PC (of the same bit version), however the files are stored in a series of zip files anyway, so you can access them manually if required. This only applies to the libraries + manually selected folders - the system image can only be fully restored AFAIK (rather than accessed).