Storage capacity problem

[freenasnoob]

Let me first say that I have never used freenas before

Now I just configured my freenas system and it is pretty ghetto I'm using an acer aspire one netbook with a 500gb external hard drive and the 144gb internal hard drive. The way I'm booting my nas is by a 14GB usb stick that i formatted with 7zip and win32 diskimager. This was just a bunch of spare hard ware that I had laying around and I wasent using this for anything else. Anyways to my main point i wanted to use this to back up my windows 7 OS. I was using the 144gb hard drive to do so. I figured that would be large enuf because the disk that has my OS on it is only about 66 gb full. The strange thing is when I tell windows to backup the OS on the hard drive it comes back with disk dosne't have enuf storage but when I look at how much storage was used it only shows 14.04 gb used out of 144gb. The only thing I can think of is that maybe somehow windows is reading my usb flash drive as the storage but I have no idea how to fix this.

 

[cyberjock]

Sorry. We don't support windows here.

Also, putting freenas on a laptop, even to learn it is often pointless. The hardware is almost never stable.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

 

[freenasnoob]

All right good to know I just thought it would be an interesting learning experience and I had the parts available. Guess Ill wait till I have the money to build a proper nas and the storage needs for one as well. As for not supporting windows I didn't know that so sorry. I'm really not a huge fan of windows I really do think it sucks and I prefer Linux but I still need windows for gaming the day when I can switch will be awesome.

 

[gpsguy]

Windows wouldn't see your FreeNAS flash drive. It would only see whatever you shared out, etc., ie. either your 144Gb or 500Gb drive. While you're only using 66Gb out of say, 500Gb, the backup program might not be smart enough know that the backup would take less than 130Gb.

Do a Google search and look for Windows backup software. Take a look at Drive Snapshot. It's not free, but it's an imaging program that can be run from within Windows. You can try it out for 30 days.

 

[freenasnoob]

Thanks ill check it out

 

[DrKK]

Also, if you have a CD-DVD on that laptop, you can boot Clonezilla (just google it), and with a 10-20 minute learning curve, you can backup the whole disk and all its partitions as is to an image file...to an external disk or whatever.