Raw backups for windows mounted filesystem (not a drive letter)?

[Darren_Dunham]

I'm looking at the instructions for handling Windows disk-image (Raw) backups, and they're explicit for what to do with a normal filesystem that appears as a drive letter (like D:\).

But I have a couple of disks that appear as mountpoints within the filesystem hierarchy and do not have individual drive letters.  Is there some way to reference those drives for a raw-disk backup?  I'm trying to see if this is valid for one system without having to use FlashBackup.

Thanks,

-- 

Darren

[Ed_Wilts]

Raw backup IS FlashBackup but you're not restricted to just drive letters.  

A perfectly valid raw device path is \\.\d:\mountpoint1

We've done a LOT of these because we ran out of drive letters on very large file-serving clusters.    If mountpoint1 is a directory and not a mount point, the directive will fail.

[Darren_Dunham]

FlashBackup is a separately licensed product, and it give you more capabilities (ability to do individual file restores).  I see that your syntax is valid for a FlashBackup policy (given in the Snapshot Administrators Guide).  I'll just have to try it and see if it works for raw.

I'm trying to do a traditional raw backup ("Windows" policy) without the licensing of FlashBackup.

[CRZ]

I'm not sure how well this will work if you aren't able to keep the image from being touched by anything else while you're backing it up, but maybe you've already planned around that potential limitation?