I have searched and not found any discussion of an issue like this one, but there has to be others with similar situations.
I have an office with seven Windows based machines networked together. In any given day, someone may plug one or more USB drives into any given computer. They may also unplug one or more USB drives from any given computer or they might move one or more USB
drives from one computer to another. This is necessary because each drive has project information on it that different people need on a very temporary basis. Also, contractors come and go throught the day with data that is transported on the external USB drives.
There are also removable drives that are more permanent than the USB drives, but less permanent than a regular internal drive. These are changed out much less frequently, but on occation.
WHS does not back up the USB drive (or the removable drive) unless someone goes into the backup configuration and adds that drive. WHS also says the computer was not backed up if someone fails to go into the backup configuration when a drive is removed.
Since it would be impractical to keep a log of adding and removing drives, someone has to go into the backup configuration of each machine at the end of each day. As it stands, the backup configuration is not done every day, resulting in a lot of drives
never being backed up and "heath critical" error messages almost every day. The messages are ignored because they are there so often. Obviously, this means the protection of backups is not good.
Is there a better way? There isn't anyone who can be assigned that duty since no one in the office has a fixed schedule so this has to be automatic.
Does the 2011 version of WHS handle this issue better? Is there an add-in that does this? Is there a better product than WHS for this situation?
