I’ve been looking in the usual places, and came up short. Is there a device available I can plug A USB based external hard drive into that makes it a full-fledged network drive?
Lots.
Example:
A proper NAS (Network Attached Storage ) normally takes internal drives, but you can also find the NAS that takes USB drives.
However, perhaps you don’t want YAED, yet another electronic device.
Perhaps you have, or can buy, the option on some other device, such as
smart TV (networked, and runs apps)
smart TV box.
Digital decoder box.
PVR ( recorder)
even the DVD blue ray player may do it
Many devices of this kind are not worth the cost of shipping. They turn a slow drive into a slower, unreliable drive. The best solution is to just use an old PC as a NAS device. It will be cheap, reliable, and fast.
If low power, or small space is needed, try a PogoPlug. They are cheap, relatively reliable, and extremely hackable. You can use them as simple NAS devices right out of the box, but there is also a large community of users who can provide Linux distributions that allow for full-featured NAS, FTP, HTTP, bittorrent and other services.
I have several USB drives on my home computer. Just plug the drive in, format if needed, then right-click the drive in the Windows Explorer, then click Properties / Sharing / Share. Fill in the blanks. Don’t forget to allow EVERYONE group to have read/write permissions.
Y’all don’t get it. I have a spiffy 4TB Western Digital external drive, not a pile of thumb drives. I want to use it to back up 2 different computers. First thing I did was make it a shared drive hanging from one, and I could do normal storage stuff all day from both. Backup, whether Windows based or WD’s version did not work on the PC that did not have the drive attached.
I suspect a driver deficiency is responsible. What I want is an NAS controller that will accept USB based hard drives. Now, I have some better search terms for Amazon and New Egg…
From these comments, it is not clear that you understand the solutions provided. They all pertain to using an external USB hard drive (like your 4TB) as a NAS share. They have nothing to do with thumb drives.
What is it that you think a NAS device will do? A hardware based solution will still present your drive as an SMB share, just like Windows does when you share it via the OS. If your backup solution does not work with a Windows SMB share, there is no reason to believe that it would work with another device’s SMB share. It is the same protocol.
It is possible that your backup solution is looking for locally attached devices as the “source” device so it does not recognize the remote share.
did you try sharing the drive on the hosting machine then mapping it from the second machine
?
Seems like people were understanding you just fine…
It doesn’t matter whether you’re using an external drive or a thumb drive, both function the same. Not that anyone accused you of using thumb drives, anyway.
This is a problem with your backup software, not your shared drive. Most network drives/NAS enclosures usually use the same protocol as Window’s shared drives (SMB), unless you specifically configure them to also have FTP or Apple filesharing servers. But even then, if the backup program doesn’t support SMB, it’s unlikely to support the other protocols.
So you can either look for other backup programs:
Or you can map your network drive to a virtual hard drive that fools whatever backup software you use into thinking it’s just another local hard drive:
http://www.overclockedtechies.com/2012/02/windows-7-home-premium-network-backup/
Not really. It’s a protocol issue, specifically with using backup software that doesn’t support network backup over SMB.
That’s exactly what people were suggesting for you 
But like they said, cheap NAS devices are usually slow and terrible, and it’s unlikely to solve your particular problem here unless it happens to come with its own backup software that doesn’t mind backing up directly to a network drive. WD’s, for example, lets you backup to a network drive – but only if it’s a WD NAS device. Because, of course, they want to upsell you. The bastards.
Straight out of the box.
You could try establishing the shared drive as a mount point on your existing volume…that might work?
Here’s some info on it:
Typically, programs can recognize that you’re trying to use an SMB share, but it’s harder for them to recognize that you’re using a mount/junction and you can trick them into working.
This is a good tutorial on creating VHDs, but it does not address mapping the VHD to a device. What am I missing?