Windows 7 Home Premium And CrashPlan Won’t Support Network Attached Storage As Backup Solution? No Problem! Using FreeNAS ISCSI To Trick Both Into Thinking Network Attached Storage’s Volumes/Partitions As Local Devices So Backup Can Be Done!

FreeNAS (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I just found out that Windows 7 Home Premium would not support backup to network attached storage. So, I said fine, CrashPlan could do the job! To my dismay, CrashPlan too would not support backup destination of network attached storage type. Well, CrashPlan had a workaround to this problem, but I tried and it refused to work for me. Luckily, I had one last trick in my sleeve, and it worked perfectly! Now, I could backup my Windows 7 Home Premium to my FreeNAS box (a software which runs network attached storage server).

How? It was (and is) all about FreeNAS ISCSI. I enabled ISCSI and created ISCSI type of volume/partition on FreeNAS box; finally I would connect Windows 7 Home Premium to FreeNAS ISCSI drive (formated it) so CrashPlan would be able to do backups to FreeNAS box (network attached storage server). Wait, wasn’t CrashPlan would not support network attached storage? I didn’t lie, but FreeNAS ISCSI (or ISCSI in general) is special! ISCSI’s job is to trick Windows 7 Home Premium (and other Windows versions) to think that it’s a local partition (i.e., internal hard drive), therefore Windows 7 Home Premium will not be able to figure out that ISCSI is not a local device (i.e., internal hard drive or partition). The same goes with CrashPlan!

Of course, once you can get ISCSI going between your Windows 7 Home Premium and the network attached storage server, you don’t really have to use CrashPlan to do backups for your Windows 7 Home Premium anymore. After all, Windows 7 Home Premium (and other Windows versions) has native backup tool. Nonetheless, in my opinion, CrashPlan is far superior as a backup tool than Windows’ own backup tool. Anyhow, it’s really up to you to use either Windows’ backup tool or CrashPlan to keep your Windows’ data safe. Furthermore, you can check out the video right after the break to see how you can set up ISCSI on FreeNAS server and how to connect to FreeNAS ISCSI from Windows 7. (You won’t be disappointed for using FreeNAS ISCSI solution as a solution for doing backups of Windows 7 Home Premium!)

CrashPlan Saves Your Files in Multiple Places (wired.com)
I Don’t Need A World Backup Day To Remind Me To Do Backups, Because I Rely On Automation! (essayboard.com)
Setting Up iSCSI With FreeNAS So Any Computer Can Have Additional Virtual Internal Hard Drives (essayboard.com)
What About CrashPlan? (essayboard.com)
Upload Any File To iCloud, But You Got To Manually Rename The Upload File Correctly! (essayboard.com)
How to Move Your CrashPlan Backups to a New Computer [Backup] (lifehacker.com)
Using FreeNAS With VirtualBox To Create A True Personal Storage Cloud? (essayboard.com)
3 Cloud Services That Make Work Easier (inc.com)
Configuring FreeNAS To Host Time Machine Volume, Allowing Mac Users To Backup Data Across Network Using Time Machine (essayboard.com)
Using FreeNAS’s CIFS Service To Allow Local Computers (e.g., Mac, Windows, Linux) To Share Data Within A Local Network (essayboard.com)
Turn an Old Computer into a Networked Machine (rajawaseem6.wordpress.com)
Tutorial: How to turn old hard drives into a secure file server (techradar.com)
Top Online Backup Solutions for Professional Photographers (posterjack.ca)
CrashPlan review (review.techworld.com)
For Backup, You’ve Got a Friend, Family or Cloud (allthingsd.com)
Backup your Mac OS using CrashPlan (beast4romtheeast.wordpress.com)

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