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Setting Drive letter before backup

SyncBackFree is the freeware version of SyncBack. It is *not* an evaluation version of SyncBackPro/SE.
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GracieAllen
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Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 2:16 am

Setting Drive letter before backup

Post by GracieAllen »

Windows 10, nothing special.

I'm using multiple HDD for backups, and Windows 10 APPEARS to be incapable of having more than one drive with the same drive letter. You can assign "v" to backup 1, and assign "v" to backup 2, but when you put backup 1 back in the computer it WON'T be "v". Turns out that's apparently something deliberate in Windows 10...

SO, create a batch job to run a 3-line text file that has diskpart assign the drive letter to a volume before backing up... Which would be fine EXCEPT THAT DISKPART DOESN'T GUARANTEE THE VOLUMES WON'T CHANGE EVERY TIME YOU RUN IT. So, "volume 17" that got set to "v" yesterday, MAY BE VOLUME 15 today when I change the backup drive. Makes things not work...

SO, HOW are people in here automatically setting the drive letter for the multiple backup drives they rotate for doing backups?
cliffhanger
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Posts: 606
Joined: Tue May 31, 2011 5:59 pm

Re: Setting Drive letter before backup

Post by cliffhanger »

This might be of interest - (provided you find it sufficiently of interest to invest in one of the commercial models (Lite, SE or Pro), as it is not supported in the Free version. Other benefits of upgrading are listed here if interested.

How useful it might be depends on exactly what you want to do and with how many profiles/disks. One possibility is to manually set (i.e.edit in Explorer) your rotated backup drives so they all have the same LABEL (e.g.'ROTATED') and run them in turn against a single profile set to copy to Destination set as

%LABEL=ROTATED%\backup\

or similar. You would need to use some kind of external label (Dymo, etc) to physically distinguish the various rotated drives if they are all the same types (cases, etc), as their Labels in Explorer would of course all display the same name. You would also need to make sure only one such drive is inserted each time you run the profile (else it would pick one of the multiple-matching drives, possibly at random)
GracieAllen
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Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 2:16 am

Re: Setting Drive letter before backup

Post by GracieAllen »

Yeah, I saw that as an option until I found out it wasn't available in the free version. If there's no other reasonable way to ensure that the backups go onto the correct device, I'll either have to go that way or just continue to manually set the drive letter when switching drives.
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