Good backup software for Windows 7?

[MajorFubar]

I use Time Machine on my iMac and my Mac Mini to backup both computers to my 3TB NAS. It's basically fit and forget: Time Machine just kind of does its stuff and I don't worry about it. So I tried to set-up the nearest equivalent thing on my wife's laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium, but imagine my surprise to find out that Windows Backup & Restore on Win 7 Home Prem will NOT backup to a network drive: the facility has been purposefully removed from all 'Home' versions of Win 7, even though it was present on Win XP and Vista Home Premium.

Can anyone recommend a good cheap 3rd-party piece of software which will do something similar? Sadly nothing's going to work in quite as integrated a way, I don't think. What the hell were Microsoft thinking?!

 

[abacus]

http://www.thesofthelp.com/2010/08/5-best-free-backup-software-for-windows.html

Hope this helps

Bill

 

[Crocodile]

Don't know if it's allowed in Home but maybe try mapping the NAS to a local drive & see if that will work.

If not, look at creating a Vitual Hard Disk in Disk Management:

Attaching and detaching a VHD [/b]

To make a VHD available for use (either one you have just created or another existing VHD), on the Action menu, select Attach VHD, and then specify the location of the VHD, using a fully qualified path.

To detach the VHD, which will make it unavailable, on the Action menu, select Detach VHD, or right-click the VHD in the volume list or graphical view, and then select Detach VHD. Detaching a VHD does not delete the VHD or any data stored in it.

Additional considerations

The path specifying the location for the VHD must be fully qualified and cannot be in the Windows directory.

The minimum size for a VHD is 3 megabytes (MB).

A VHD can only be a basic disk.

Because a VHD is initialized when it is created, creating a large fixed-size VHD might take some time.

 

[MajorFubar]

Thanks. I'll have a look at both options. All this hassle, presumably because too many small businesses weren't buying the enterprise versions. Lovely.