If you’re reading this, chances are you are running Windows 7 Home Premium and need a workaround for the network backup feature found in Professional (or your previous Vista Home Premium had it). Well guess what? No need to give Microsoft more money for an upgrade, the trick is backing up to a VHD stored on the network. Windows will see your VHD as a normal, internal, drive!
UPDATE! I have added a video! For some reason, people are not able to backup to their VHDs, I do not know what the percentage is, but the VHD must be considerably larger than your total amount of disk space, I believe this to be the issue.
Create a Virtual Hard Drive (VHD)
Login as an administrator and open Computer Management > Disk Management. On the right menu, click More Actions and Create VHD.
Save your VHD to the network location. Set the size of your VHD and select Dynamically Expanding. Click OK.
Initialize the drive by right clicking on it.
Select MBR and click OK.
Create a Simple Volume by right clicking on the drive. Follow the prompts in setting up your VHD.
Depending on your Autorun configuration you may get the Autoplay prompt when the drive is ready. Open Windows Backup, you should now see your VHD as a backup destination.
Automatic Attachment on Startup
Follow our guide on getting your VHDs to attach automatically.
Does not show up as a backup option in Windows Backup. Was this feature removed?
The Windows 7 Home Premium machines I have access to are still backing up to their VHDs on the network. Windows 7 Home Premium never could backup to a network location directly, but it will backup to a VHD, which is saved on the network, because VHDs are seen as internal drives.
I am getting the same thing.
The VHD is attached and does not show up as a backup destination?
2 questions about setting up the VHD:
1) Is there any way to get it to connect to the network drive w/ different username/pw? (For legacy reasons, my credentials differ; yet another project for a rainy day)
2) you can’t really take advantage of dynamic expansion can you, since the alloc step has to be within the initial size?
In any case thanks for the life-saving post!
You should be able to, if you can access that network location through Windows Explorer, enter your credentials and save them (they may show in the credential manager) you shouldn’t have a problem. For example, I’m storing the backups on a linux box with passwords on each share, all I had to do was access those shares, enter the username and password in like I normally do, check the remember me box, and it works.
From what I’ve experienced, the VHDs are compatible with the dynamic expansion method, they will be a tad bigger, but you can choose that option.
Don’t know if a patch addressed this or not, but I was unable to get this to work. Never got the option to use the vhd as a backup location after it was formatted. Tried several options but no dice.
Gonna see if there is a command-line work-around.
Let me know what you find, AFAIK this hasn’t been patched, I have access to three Windows 7 machines (different manufacturers), fully patched, and are still mounting the network VHDs and backing up to them automatically. I can also mount them manually and backup to them manually.
For kicks, will Windows Backup see a local VHD?
After playing around with it, I have a better idea of what’s going on. Make sure that the size of your VHD is considerably larger than the total amount of used space which is to be backed up. I can backup to both fixed and dynamically formatted VHDs, located locally or on the network. I have my own issues with Samba not allowing large transfers but I was successful in creating and backing up to VHDs with Windows 7 Home Premium x86, freshly installed and fully patched.
For kicks, I also created two (fixed and dynamic) 500MB disks and because they were smaller than the size of data to be backed up, they did not show up as a backup destination.
Try creating a VHD which is twice the size of your hard drive. From there, create and customize the drives to your preference.
I believe this may have been patched.
I keep getting the error that ‘The path name for a virtual disk must be fully qualified.’
Kind regards.
Where are you receiving this error? During the creation or attachment process?
I got that error on creation of the VHD also; the trick is to make sure you enter a .vhd file in the location you are creating the VHD
As in the images above, do not just enter the path of the network location as \\STORA\Backups\ enter the location of a VHD file you are creating as \\STORA\Backups\wbackup.vhd
My virtual disk is being created as I type this, and I’ll post more only if I encounter any further problems.
Oh, and thanks Jared for a great article!
Just tried this today works exactly as stated, first time.
Tried this today. It’s currently writing to the VHD as I type. I did have to give it a drive letter after going through the wizard, it selected F for me but didn’t actually assign it, so it didn’t show up in backup manager or explorer. Once I then manually assigned a new drive letter (H in case it matters) it appeared and I was able to start the back up process.
So yeah – if you can’t see it in Explorer, you can’t back up to it. If you can’t see it in explorer go back into disk management and make sure not only that it’s still there, but that it has a drive letter (and enough space)
which, incidentally, confirms that it’s not been patched out – my PCs are all fully genuine and up to date Home Premium machines. The one I’m backing up from is a 32bit. Maybe 64 bit is patched, but 32 definitely isn’t.
Great, thanks for the tip!
This is awesome, thanx! Tried on most current Win 7 Home Premium SP2 w/all updates and confirming it’s working flawlessly
Hi guys. I tried it and it seems that after reboot VHD is lost and cannot reconnect. I try to run it on Laptop so the network connection is established after you log on as it is on WIFI is it the case? I will try to find to ‘connect before log on’ option but this is just to let you know.
I also tried with permanent size (Not dynamically expanding) one and it didn’t work.
I have not tried the permanent size, my NAS for some reason won’t handle transfer >5GB.
After a reboot, attach the VHD after waiting 5-7minutes, if you can attach it then everything is working fine, the VHD is still “locked” because it wasn’t “detached” properly and so until the process is killed on timeout, you’ll get weird file in use errors.
Any idea on how to then restore a computer using a backup created with this process?
The restoration process is unchanged. Considering you have the ability to load the VHD with a boot disc or second PC, and copy the backup files to an external drive if for some reason the PC to be restored does not have network access.
I have gone thru this process and was able to setup a VHD that is 700 gb. But i cant seem to initialize it. I have the VHD on a external hard drive that is setup thru my network with a username and password, but when i click initialize it thinks for a second and does not go online so that i can create a simple volume. (ive set it up with MBR and clicked ok as the instructions say, but unable to proceed farther due to not being able to go online)
Any help or answers?
Does it timeout? What kind of error do you get? Can you create and put online a 500gb VHD? (curious if the issue is size)
It doeskin timeout it just sits there after ive clicked initialize like i never clicked it in the first place. I haven’t done 500gb but i did 200gb and it did the same thing. And no error. It just sits there, and doesn’t do anything. Ive all but given up i spent a few hours trying everything i could think of.
How long do you wait? When doing this in a VM it took a few minutes to initialize the disk. Could be latency issues on your LAN.
One way to troubleshoot this it create a small VHD locally, if you’re successful move it to the LAN and try again.
Ok this is all great, but if my hard drive crashed how do I use the disk image on the networked VHD to install my new HD?
If you have a windows 7 disk you can boot to that and do a recovery. You have to be connected the network via ethernet and you should be able to browse to the backup file. The win7 disk loads basic drivers for the ethernet port but not the wireless adapter.
Oops! That won’t work. Only the PC that created the VHD can use it. When you browse to it it’s just a big .vhd file that is worthless to use as a backup. So, you could reinstall windows with the win7 disc and then re-attach the vhd and do a restore.
This worked fine for me. Win7 home premium. And my other Win 7 machine can open and read the contents of the VHD. So I suppose if I need these backups that a system prepared from a crash recovery disc will be able to read these backups to complete the restore.
So I suppose the Microsoft thinks that home premium users don’t need to backup their system? That I’d have to connect a USB drive right here at the laptop? This is one of the many reasons why I’m moving to Linux. Only 2 Windows computers left. The rest are all Linux.
I have a NAS box on my n/w, and can successfully map to it with read/write access. I have an issue when I try to create the VHD. I can browse to the location I want to create the VHD, when I click OK I get “RPC Server Unavailable”. I checked RPC Service is running and this occurs irrespective if firewall enabled or not (Win 7 Home Prem)
I’m trying really hard to remember, I kept running into weird messages, including this one, when setting up Samba.
If you reboot the NAS, does it work for a period of time then give you that message? Do you have shell access to the NAS?
if i click on initialise than nothing happens and the disk will stay not initialised
Setting up the VHD double the size of my c:drive worked like a charm!
Works as advertised, thanks for the tip.
Nicely done. shame this wasnt top of the search when i googled it
For me it still works. Running Win 7 Home Premium connected to a Seagate NAS.
AWESOME!!!!!! worked perfect! win 7 HP backed up to network server! THANK YOU!!!! now I have a permanent clean copy of 7 + WHS 2011 daily backups. I’ll sleep better tonight!