BackUp to Elements External USB Drive 1 TB via WD TV HD Live

My set-up is relatively simple: wifi through a D-Link 650 from PC (Windows 7 Home Premium). The D-Link has a 4-port ethernet switch: one port is used for a WD TV Live HD with a WD Elements usb-disk connected. I can freely access the disk and create folders, copy stuff and so forth. And the multimediabox can stream to mt tv-set. All is good. But I want to make a back-up of my pc-disk over the net (with EMC Retrospect Express HD) and that fails every time (error -1116 I believe - no access to file/disk whatever) - Am I just over committing the capabilities of the WD-set-up or has anybody acheived what I try?

First check if you have proper network access to the Elements on your network, map it by clicking on start and then typing \wdtvlive or \yourWDTVIPaddress or \thenameyougaveitifyouchangedit and you should see the USB drives connected to the WDTV, right-click each and select “map network drive” to secure the path on Computer. If you can copy files to the Elements that way then your backup program should be able to do the same unless it has networking issues with the whole setup.

Both actions already in place when I first reported the problem

One question came to my mind: what is the difference between a NAS on one side and a WD TV Live with a USB-attached Elements disk on the other? Any differences on a protocol level?

Well, of course, it depends on the NAS.

The Live and Live+ only support Samba file sharing.