I'm using a cloud backup service that only permits internal drives to be backed up. The thing is, I share all my backup-relevant stuff on a NAS.
Is there anyway to fool Windows 7, or at least any software running on it, into believing the network drive is internal? the NAS is a qnap which supports Samba, NTFS, Apple, FTP…
Whether you can cheat your backup software depends on the intelligence of the software. You can easily map a network drive or folder in the drive to a local drive name (eg. Z:)
I did the same things for the same reason recently and this were my steps:
In Windows 7 there might be a bug reconnecting to the network drive when you boot up. You can see the solution to that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQZanQD-wG8
Hope this helps!
I read through the answers and come up with my own solution / workaround to this problem.
It's something like this:
mklink /d "c:\data\network docs" "\\server\shareddata\"
originally asked here: How do I mount a network drive to a folder?
this does not create a new Z: drive but rather maps c:\data\network folder as a network share and then you can point your software just to this folder.
I was unable to fool CCleaner to scan for duplicate files on a Z: network drive but it worked on a mounted C:\share folder.
If you strictly need the share to represent a "drive" on your system - you can go 1 step further with: subst y: c:\share
sourced from: https://winaero.com/create-virtual-drive-from-a-folder-in-windows-10/
There is a command that maps a network drive the way, that Photoshop Lightroom does not recognize it as a network drive, maybe it works for your service as well:
C:\Windows\System32\subst.exe a: \\nasIpAddress\share
But I would rather use another backup service like duplicati, which supports many network protocols.
