Does WD Backup recognize network hard drives?

WD Software & Mobile Apps WD Software
1

I’m very close to getting a WD MyPassport 4TB drive (WD My Passport External Portable Hard Drive HDD (1 TB to 5 TB) | Western Digital) to backup data from a PC that has a dual-boot installation of Windows XP and Ubuntu. This is, of course, impractical because, while Ubuntu supports a 4TB drive, neither OS supports WD software.

I believe I can solve this by using a Windows 7 laptop I also own. So what I’m planning to do is connect the external drive to the laptop, then install all the necessary software on it (mainly WD Backup), then connect the laptop to the PC via an Ethernet cable.

My question is, is a backup possible if I do it this way? Will WD Backup recognize the hard disk I got on my PC via the network I would have just created?

P.S.: I would probably do the backup while on my Ubuntu OS to avoid this hassle, but it has crashed multiple times when I tried to copy big amounts of data from the PC to an external drive and vice versa so I try to avoid this route as much as I can. Its version is 14.04 if that matters.

2

WD Backup is used to backup on DAS drives, but can’t be used with network hard drives. Also WD software tools are not supported by Ubuntu OS, needs to transfer data in Windows 7 if space available.

3

So what you’re getting at is that I can’t use WD Backup from my Windows 7 laptop to backup a network hard drive? What if I format my Windows XP installation to Windows 7, then try to backup my HDD? Will any files be lost during the format?

4

As WD Backup is a backup tool to create backup of Direct Attached Storage devices, it doesn’t support Network drives for backup.