USB drive letters

[JayDee]

Backing up to USB devices with different drive letters is of concern

I discovered that the backup still worked correctly even though the
 device was mounted with a different letter from the the setup

It would appear that Hasleo searches for an appropriate drive even
if the letter does not match the original configuration.

Is this a consistent behaviour and (as a result) I don't need to
be concerned the external device letter may change from the
configured backup.

JD

[Froggie]

@JayDee - I believe Hasleo uses GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers) when your target is 1st set up... this eliminates the problem when disk drives get mounted at the same letter.

If you're familiar with Macrium REFLECT, it allows its users to use either declaration... drive letters or GUIDs.  You should be fine...

[JayDee]

That was my conclusion as well.

With Macrium I was able to "Diskpart" the disk UNIQUEID so that I had a set of 3 drives
that I could rotate and fool Macrium into using any one of the 3 in rotation.

Tried that with Hasleo without success so far. So Hasleo may indeed be using the full GUID.

Do you have any suggestions for disk rotation.

One solution would be to create an identical backup setup for each drive
and then count on the operator to call the correct one to match the drive.
If they picked to wrong one they would just get an error message so easy
to fix and pick the right one.  See edits below for a working solution.

JD

Edit:
  I did have success with the UNIQUEID trick using full external USB drives.
  Using memory sticks with the UNIQUEID trick does not seem to work
  I'll keep trying with the USB sticks

Edit2:
  With fresh USB sticks I was able to set both sticks to the same UNIQUEID
  and used the sticks interchangeably  with the same Hasleo backup config

Conclusion:
  I can rotate the backup media and also not worry about drive letters.

[Froggie]

@JayDee - some quick testing (W10) shows me that it finds the original drive lettered drive no matter where it is mounted (as you found), and I used (2) different sticks (same disk label, same manufacturer, same capacity) and tested it with different partition serial#s on each stick and it still found the proper stick and ran successfully.

I'll have to back off on my original supposition above about GUIDs based on that.  I'll run one other test and report back... maybe the Devs can jump in here and clarify.

[admin]

Hasleo Backup Suite uses the unique partition identifier instead of the drive letter to identify a path, because the drive letter of the partition usually changes after starting WinPE, and the correct partition can be found in WinPE using the unique partition identifier.

[JayDee]

Hasleo Backup Suite uses the unique partition identifier instead of the drive letter to identify a path, because the drive letter of the partition usually changes after starting WinPE, and the correct partition can be found in WinPE using the unique partition identifier.

Thanks for the confirmation.

As I mentioned above, the UNIQUEID also provides a mechanism to also allow rotating the external backup media.

JD

[JayDee]

For anyone following this thread:
I have not been able to get consistent results swapping destination media
even tho' (initially) it seemed to work once I had assigned the same UNIQUEID
to the destination media.

I will probably create duplicate configurations for each of the external
drives and simply select the correct configuration to match the attached drive.

JD