Trick Carbonite to backup off a network drive?

[TorturedChaos]

So my boss found this Carbonite online backup service, signed up, installed it, then goes hey! why can't I backup the stuff off of our networked sever. Well turns out Carbonite wont backup files that are not on your computers hard drive.

You might ask why isn't Carbonite just installed on our server than? Well several reason. Its running Linux, and as far as i can tell there isn't a version of there client software for linux. #2, I didn't setup the server, don't really know anything about it. The boss's son set it up, and he is several states away now going to collage. If I crash our server we ARE SCREWED! so i'm not about to start playing with it.

And I'm not about to copy the files to the computer that has Carbonite on it as they change quite often, its about 100 - 150 gigs, and the computer running the Carbonite clinet only has about an 80 gig HDD.


So my questions is as the Message title states: Does anyone know a way to trick Carbonite's client to backup off a network drive?

Thanks in advane

 

[DelJo63]

I think Carbonite is an online service; the data store is on a webserver.

The restriction on mapped drives is interesting.
There are other solutions, such as smbdataprotection.com

 

[TorturedChaos]

Yah I was very surprised to see the restriction on a network drive also. Seems to be a very odd restriction.

But I have a new idea, just no way to implement it. Does anyone know of a software that would let me emulate the network drive as a hdd? So then windows would think it was a internal HDD and I could use Carbonite with it?

Thanks

 

[DelJo63]

not trivial! you would need a special driver that pretends to implement IDE or SCSI
and be able to configure it to access the IP address and the Share in question.

even something like VMWARE would still need network access.

forget it -- just not practical.

 

[TorturedChaos]

Oh ok. Didn't realize it was so complicated.

Thanks for the reply

 

[TorturedChaos]

Well after much searching of google decided that there was not way for me to trick carbonite or windows into treating a network driver as a local drive.

Luckily we found an extra hdd laying around in storage. Seems to work, so I wrote up a .bat file with a couple of xcopy commands in it. Set it to run every night after we are closed.