2 external HDDS with same drive letter

Soldato
Joined
6 Jan 2006
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Location
Newcastle upon Tyne
Looking at a cheap and cheerful solution to taking an offsite backup as the ransomware thread in the Windows forum got me thinking I would be screwed if anyone at work got that.

There may be a better longer term solution in the short term I was just going to rotate 2 USB HDDs daily and take them offsite each night. Is there a way to assign the same drive letter to each drive so that I dont need to do anything with the backup software once its considered to backup to that drive letter?

I'll be buying 2 identical drives and they wont be plugged in at the same time, only ever swapped over.
 
In your backup script..

Code:
@echo off
title Daily backup task

if exist s:\placeholder.txt set drive=s
if exist t:\placeholder.txt set drive=t
echo.
echo %drive% is currently connected
echo.
robocopy /mir "c:\source\folder" "%drive%:\destination\folder"




Create placeholder.txt on the root of both drives, you can set it as hidden so you don't see it in Explorer :) Set the drives as S and T drive.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the reply bledd but given my technical ability I've never felt comfortable using robocopy to be honest and instead use Cobian Backup.
 
Since both drives aren't going to be connected at the same time, it's unlikely that they'll be assigned different drive letters when connected but the best way to find out is to plug one in and let all the drivers install and if the second drive shows the same drive letter when it has its turn to be connected (just remember to unplug the other drive first) then you're all good to go without any other changes to make.
 
I would still assign them a higher letter than normal.

Or assign them both to B:

Otherwise, what happens if there's a usb stick in..


-That's your whole script written for you above.. Just edit the source/destinations and you're done!
 
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