TR Forums

I'm trying to sort out my backup system. Currently I have a case with a hot-swap 3.5" slot on top. I have two spare HDDs laying around that I am using as backups. One I will keep connected, the other will be stored offsite and updates semi-regularly. In order to do this I wanted to swap out which drive was doing which role every month or so. In order for GoodSync, as well as my network drive mapping to not break I need to keep both drives mapped to the same letter on my PC. However when I assign the letter to one, and then remove it and plug the other one in it bumps the 2nd drive off that letter, even when it's not connected. Has anyone run into this sort of thing and solved it? No matter which drive is currently attached I need my backup software and network to be able to find it in the same location. Thanks for any advice.

Not at the same time, you have to make sure the other 2 drivers are unplugged first.

You will have to re-assign the letter manually with diskmgmt.msc (Disk Management applet), or you can explore using diskpart in a script. Not sure if you will get the same volume # each time when you plug a different disk in so you have to do some testing yourself.

Well this is possible because i had to do it for a client a few years ago. The same exact scenario, 2 external hdds that were rotated out of the office for a measure of off-site security. Each drive had to have the same drive letter every time it was connected to a certain pc in order for the backup software to successfully complete.

Anyway, I was able to re-assign the same drive letter to each drive through disk management, one at a time. I remembered picking a drive letter that was pretty far down in the alphabet so that anything else being plugged in, like a flash drive, wouldn't "steal" the drive letter in question. I think I used "R" and was able to give 2 different drives the same letter as long as they weren't plugged in at the same time. Keep in mind that this was on a winXP system, so not sure if win7/8 behaves the same way. Good luck!

I've never done it with network mapping before, but I've done that with local drives - I had two different USB drives that I swapped for offsite backup and both were assigned as the E drive. That was back on Server 2003 so I don't know if there has been a change since then or not. I'm confused about the network mapping side of things - I would think if you named the share the same thing on both drives (//computer/ext_backup or something like that) the remote computer wouldn't care which drive was hooked up as long as that is where it landed for the share name. It sounds like you're saying it gets assigned a different drive letter - maybe try disconnecting drive 1, restarting, connecting drive 2. Otherwise, when you connect drive 2, manually change the drive letter to "E" or whatever you want it to be. Like I said, my experience was that manually changing the drive letter seemed to work for me. Try using a "higher" letter for both, like X or something so windows doesn't try to grab the next available (D,E or F) every time you plug in a new drive.

Network mapping is even easier with the "net use" command. This one you don't even need to be running the Command Prompt as Administrator.