FMServer Can't Backup to Mapped Drive

[butchm]

Hi All,

Have this curious problem. I've set FMServer Task Scheduler to backup automatically to a hard drive called Z:. It always fails, and the Event Viewer shows that the drive cannot be found.

The server is W2k, FMServer 5.5. The mapped drive is shared by WinXP Pro.

I've tried setting the backup to the local C: drive and it works fine. I've also tried changing the Mapped drive to another letter but still doesn't work.

The Mapped Drive appears fine in My Computer and I can copy and move files in and out.

Any ideas on what I might have missed? Thanks in advance!

butchm

[Wim Decorte]

I can't remember if it is a bug or not, but I wouldn't use a mapped drive anyway. The changes of the network share not being mapped to the correct drive letter are significant.

What does work is using the UNC path to the network share:

serverNameshareName

(or use the server's IP address instead of the server's name to rule out DNS issues).

[butchm]

Great suggestion, haven't thought about that yet! Will try to check this out in a couple of days as it is on a client site.

Am wondering, though, I have setup this type of backup before on two other servers and they didn't have any problems, so this may turn out to be a bug with FMS.

Thanks again for the help!

[wallaper]

I can't get a mapped drive to become a valid path either.

I just talked to filemaker who told me that this will work with 7.02.

The tech told me that the path must start with filewin://driveletter/folder/ to work but I have had no luck.

[DykstrL]

Have FM server backup to a folder on a local drive - preferrably a separate drive - then use task scheduler to copy those backup files to the mapped drive. It will work more consistently AND you will have an extra backup copy from the last backup.

If you want to get really fancy, you can setup a week or 2 or 3 weeks worth of backup folders on the local drive and the mapped network drive and have task scheduler copy the backup files from the server backup folder to the local drive in the appropriate folder, then do the same thing for the network drive. Then you have 3 copies of backups, all separated on physical drives - and assuming that the network drive is being backed up to tape, you have 4 distinct backup copies. If you ever have to restore a file on the server, you probably will never have to go all the way back to the tape backups - even if you have a drive failure.

[Ted S]

If you're still having trouble with this you should check windows security. The service that FileMaker is running under (probably local system) might not have "write" permission to the other machine.