Some companies are offering economical cloud backup with no data size limits but they restrict it to one license per Windows installation and only local physically attached drives. Network drives, even if mapped to a local drive letter, are not supported. I'm curious if anyone knows if unRaid volumes can appear as a local physical drive to an unRaid Windows VM and still be shared with unRaid, and hence other systems on the network, independent of the Windows VM? I suspect the answer is no but it's worth asking.

You could try creating a local VHD per 

 

which will work for things like Origin and Battle.Net, not sure if it would work for cloud providers though YMMV

User shares are accessible to a VM just like any other computer on your network. Within a VM you can map a user share to a drive letter.

You can pass through a controller to Windows and drives will appear local to Windows. But will disappear from unRaid.

 

I do not think there is a way to make the array appear local as you are hoping. I expect the cloud companies have closed any loophole.

 

You can create a new virtual disk using the VMmanager (click the plus sign to left of where the OS virtual disk is defined.) That disk will appear local. But don't think this helps very much.

@SSD and others thanks for your replies. I figured it was worth asking but I suspect they have closed the loopholes. I've done controller passthroughs with VMWare and ESXi and suppose I could share a local disk from within Windows using Windows networking but that's not ideal for other reasons.

What about using Symlinks or Hard Links? Would that work for your use case?

@dev_guy, @GHunter

 

The issue is having a Linux disk appear as local to Windows. If you could, links would help. Windows style links are not effective.

 

Unrelated, but the same restrictions on disks are in place when running in administrator mode in Windows. Network disks, even those with a mapped drive letter, are not recognized. I'm sure this is done as a security measure. I had wanted to map my TEMP directory to a network drive to avoid all temp files being written to my cache ssd. Wound up creating a second vxd on a UD spinner that appeared a local drive and worked. (Note making TEMP point to a network drive worked for some programs not others).

 

One idea for achieving original intent is to have one or more disks attached to a specific controller that could be passed through. Initially do not pass them through and load them with data to back up, then pass them through and they are seen by Windows as local and could be backed up to the cloud backup service. Repeat with next chunk of data. You just would not want the cloud to flush the data it backed up when those files were no longer seen in Windows. This is probably configurable in some way, but there could be limitations.

You could add a second drive to the VM and place it on a disk in the array. Then you can resize it also if more space is needed. 

This way you have more space than using the cache drive for the vhd. 

I'll have to play around with some options. I don't even have a Windows VM running yet but appreciate the suggestions.