![]() In the event of a network or local system disruption, your file I/O will have to go through two extra layers with higher than normal latency before its securely stored on the drive. Virtual hard drives stored on remote system and accessed over the internet - whether it be a Windows virtual hard drive with BitLocker or a Cryptomator drive - can be quite unreliable and prune to data loss and corruption. I never got this to work under Windows, and it was unreliable and failed to detect and mount the Cryptomator volumes more often than not when I tried it under MacOS. Mountain Duck has support for automatically detecting, unlocking, and mounting virtual drives stored on its network shares through Cryptomator. ![]() Cryptomator is a free and open-source utility that creates an encrypted virtual hard drive that can be used as a Windows Backup destination. If you don’t have Windows 10 Professional edition, you can use a third-party solution like Cryptomator instead. If you’ve Windows 10 Professional, you can work-around the network share limitation by creating a virtual hard drive and storing it on your B2 network share. It also won’t work on network shares and can’t work with ExpanDrive or Mountain Duck. BitLocker is only available in Windows 10 Professional and not available on non-NTFS file systems. As discussed earlier, you’ve to rely on Microsoft BitLocker for encryption. Windows Backup itself has no support for on-device encryption of backups. Windows Backup encryption is an unsolved problem I’ll get back to the third option after first addressing encryption solutions. There’s a third option and it’s the only free and open-source software for Windows in this category. I only spent a few days with each of these and I was seriously unimpressed with both programs. I’ve also fully copied some test files onto a mounted Backblaze drive, rebooted the computer, and then discovered that all or some of the files were missing. You can use them as-is to back up your computer with Windows Backup but without encrypting your backups.īoth will fail if your network take a long time to come online or if the network connection comes online, drops out, and then comes back online. They both work, however! They’ll even optionally let you automatically mount the partition when you boot the computer. Frankly, neither of them are worth their asking price. Neither program show any sign of ever having gone through any user experience testing and they were frustratingly unclear on their use. Mountain Duck offers a free trial version, but that somehow expired more than six months before I installed the program and the program kept nagging me about the license.īoth programs use a taskbar icons with menus/guessing game as their primary interface with no clear path to progression. The two available options for Windows are ExpanDrive (80 USD) or Mountain Duck (40 USD with paid upgrades.) Both programs lets you mount Backblaze B2 among other hosted storage providers as local network shares in Windows. There are several good software options for Linux and MacOS, but the Windows options are more pricey. ![]() This proved surprisingly difficult to achieve in Windows. Mounting a B2 storage bucket in WindowsĪ prerequisite of using Windows Backup is to mount the destination, a Backblaze B2 storage bucket in this case, as either a network share or hard drive in Windows. This tool was known as File History in earlier versions of Windows, but you can now find it in the Windows Settings app under the name Windows Backup. Windows has a built-in backup system that provides file versioning so you can restore earlier versions (“previous versions”) of documents and files right from File Explorer. FreeBSD, Linux, and MacOS all have several great software options for using B2 for backup, but the selection on Windows isn’t as good. You get an easy-to use software for MacOS and Windows with Personal Backup, but with B2 you’ve to bring your software and connect it to the B2 service. At about 5 USD per month per TB, you can cut cost if you’ve multiple computers or a backup smaller than a Terabyte compared to Backblaze Personal Backup at 5 USD per month per computer. ![]() The software required to do this isn’t quite there yet, but you still have some options.īackblaze B2 hosted network storage service is affordable for storing backups. I’ve reviewed the different possible options for backing up your Windows 10 computer with Windows Backup (formerly known as File History) to the ultra-cheap backup storage provider Backblaze B2.
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