I have an external drive connected to my laptop via an eSATA cable to a PC-Express eSATA card. The first time I connected it, last week, OneCare had no problem seeing it and I did a full backup. (Local, not centralized).
Today I re-connected the drive, and it is visible to Windows explorer. But OneCare backup fails with a message "...cannot find backup device".
When I go into OneCare's backup settings, I see the option as "External Hard Drive (not connected)".
I've re-booted and the problem remains. I can explore the external drive (which is mapped as the I: drive) but OneCare fails to be able to use it. Very baffling since it had no problem doing a full backup the last time.
Can you see the One Care backup folder on the external drive? I'm a little confused by this as e-sata is not supported by One Care. One Care sees e-sata as an internal drive and the only way I know of to use e-sata as a backup destination is per the workaround in this post - http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/onecarebackupandrestore/thread/22258a6a-3e94-4ac2-a3e7-b21683fb913cJim - MVP Windows Live - Forum Moderator - Live One Care - Live Mesh
Can you see the One Care backup folder on the external drive? I'm a little confused by this as e-sata is not supported by One Care. One Care sees e-sata as an internal drive and the only way I know of to use e-sata as a backup destination is per the workaround in this post - http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/onecarebackupandrestore/thread/22258a6a-3e94-4ac2-a3e7-b21683fb913cJim - MVP Windows Live - Forum Moderator - Live One Care - Live Mesh
Yes, using Windows explorer I can see the One Care folder and all subfolders, catalogs, etc. which were created during the previous full backup.
If what you're saying is correct (and I don't doubt that it is) then I should be able to workaround this by connecting the drive via USB 2.0, it supports both. But I was 99% sure that the original full backup was performed over the eSata. After reading your post my certainty drops to about 75% :-)
It's too bad that this isn't supported, as the eSATA connection is much faster than USB.
I'll either go to USB or the workaround which pretends that the local drive is a network drive.
Thanks again,
Jay
P.S. Kudos to the OC team... I'm running 4 Vista machines plus two for my kids in college, and I spent the last year or so trying every mainstream protection package... I won't name names... I am very happy with OneCare, it is the clear winner in my opinion.