unRaid volumes appearing as local windows drives?


dev_guy

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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.

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  • 2 weeks later...

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.

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@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.

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