You can use a remote drive in Windows 7 Home Premium

MS and their wisdom of removing features from past releases of their OS, never ceases to amaze me and file them under the WTF where they thinking files. Well, I guess I do know: They're greedy bastards.

Anyway, if you want to ba able to backup your Win 7 system remotely, I found a nice howto, here:

http://www.roflxd.com/index.php?q=node/3

I'm copying it from there and posting here, in case the directions should ever go away:

Backing Up Windows 7 Home Premium to a Network Share

Fri, 04/16/2010 - 23:29 — PlasmaFlow

Well many people are complaining that Microsoft decided that allowing people to perform backups on their Windows 7 Home Premium to a Network share should be a paid Feature.

Well Uncle Bill was unaware that his little elves gave us something called Virtual Hard Drives on Windows 7 Home Premium.

To perform a system backup to a network drive you simply do the following.

First Asses the location of your Network Backup.

Second Make sure you can map the Drive using an UNC name Share, I/E \\ComputerName\Folder.

Third Create a Local Drive by Mapping the Network Location using the UNC to said drive so that the machine can remember the login information to the network share thus aiding in authenticating you whenever the machine is connected to the network share.

Fourth Open your Computer Management Panel and Select Actions>>Create VHD.
Here you have two options to map the new VHD.
A)Enter the UNC Path in the Location Box as \\ComputerName\Folder or B)Use the Drive letter to the newly mapped network share drive you just created.

Next Select the Virtual Hard Drive Size and the designated allocation information MB - Mega Bytes, GB - Giga Bytes or TB - Terabytes.

The window suggests to use a Fixed size drive but Since I know how these drives work in the Hyper-V server (and yes it’s the same type of drive) setting it to dynamically expanding will allow you to make the drive Up to the size requested but if you backup only takes half the space, your virtual drive will not exceed the amount allotted. All in all this is your choice and I recommend familiarizing yourself with the technicalities if you wish to make a different decision.

Once the options are entered click ok on Create and Attach Virtual Hard Disk
Window.

The new drive is created.

Now right click on the drive on the left side of the pane where the Disk Designation is on the window. Since I only had one physical drive my new VHD was called DISK 1.
Select Initialize Volume from the menu options.
Once the init is complete, right click on the drive and select to create a simple volume. Some options will come up, you can choose the defaults all the way, or choose whatever settings make you happy, including a label for the volume and the drive letter.

Once the configuration is complete the drive will be automatically formatted and mounted. A message stating that the drive has now been successfully mounted will come up.

After this you will be prompted with a menu that will contain an option to use this newly created VHD as a backup disk. This will in turn open the backup wizard and allow you to perform your backup of your user files, settings and more importantly a recovery image.

Once your backup is completed, make sure to create a recovery disk form the menu option on the left side of the backup page. This disk will allow you to boot to it since it is created as a CD that is bootable. It will also allow you to restore the system and or any missing files that you may want to recover.

And Viola! You now have Network Backup once more in Windows 7 Home Premium.

And this my friends is the ROFL of the day Courtesy of ROFLXD!

Making fun of technology foibles!
Aren’t I a Stoinker?

PlasmaFlow