Question : Backing up to an external USB drive on virtualised SBS 2008 (Hyper-V)

Hi there,

I'm hoping some bright spark can help me out with this tricky problem that has been foxing me for a couple of days now.

I have Server 2008 R2 running Hyper-V.  Within Hyper-V I have a virtualised SBS 2008 server with two assigned IDE drives, one 70GB and one 200GB.   I know that SBS 2008 only backs up to USB which is fine, however my problem is that the site where this server is to be installed will be disconnecting the external USB drive and taking it away, and reconnecting the next day.

SBS seems to want an internal disk to copy to when doing a scheduled backup.  I have tried to map a *.vhd file (stored on the extenal USB) via an additional SCSI controller on the VM settings page, which does work, HOWEVER, when the USB drive is disconnected, it breaks the link to the *.vhd file (within the VM, in drive management, the drive shows up as offline)

I think I need to go along the route of copying to a share, which would work I think as the USB drive always shows up as the E drive when reconnected to the host, so as long as I point the backups to the relevant share in the VM backup configuration, the backup will succeed.  Unfortunately as the host is not on the same domain as the SBS VM, I get username popups when accessing the share...  Do I need to script something?

Thanks

Answer : Backing up to an external USB drive on virtualised SBS 2008 (Hyper-V)

The only thing is that the passwords are stored in clear text in that file.

But if you're cool with that then that'll do it.

Good Luck,
- gurutc