Backing up Win 7 Home Premium via iSCSI + Synology NAS

This post describes how to use iSCSI on Win 7 Home Premium to work around the restriction of backing up to a networked device.

Like many of you, I didn't fork out for Win 7 Enterprise for my home set-up. One thing the Enterprise edition allows which the Home Premium edition does not is backing up to a network drive. Kind of irritating, when you consider that a lot of folks will have networked storage either in a NAS or USB attached storage to consumer networking devices like wireless routers and cable modems.

Until recently, I'd been backing up my Win 7 Home edition to a USB drive, then using the Synology Data Replicator 3 tool to shunt the backup data from the USB drive to the NAS. This is an irritating multi-step process and takes longer than it should.

To work around it (sorry, not going to go through the specifics but they can easily be searched for):

• set up an iSCSI target on your NAS
• use Windows 'iSCSI Initiator' tool to connect to the target
• use Windows Computer Management->Disk Management console to locate the new storage, format it and present it on your Win 7 machine wherever you'd like it (note that Windows backup will only let you back up to what it considers an external drive, so you may need to mount as a drive letter or folder other than on C:\). Despite the drive existing on the network, Windows sees it as a local hard disk.
• reconfigure your backup to point to the new backup location created in the above steps
• run your backup.

Now the external drive I was previously using for backups can go on to other duties.