On 3/7/2013 1:20 AM, scott wrote:
>> **However** if you create an empty folder, called backup, on the C:
>> drive, then you can "mount" your external drive to that folder,
>
> That's exactly what I do - mounting the external drive using its GUID so
> I'm sure it's always the correct drive. Whilst this works, there are a
> few "issues". Firstly I have no idea what will happen if the folder
> "backup" already exists and has data in it, will that data be
> unavailable whilst the drive is mounted to that folder and then reappear
> once the drive is unmounted? Also it seems that you need to run the
> command prompt or script as admin to get this to work, whereas if you
> write directly to the drive via its drive letter you don't. Thirdly you
> have to check errors carefully otherwise you end up physically writing
> your entire backup to drive C rather than the external drive.
>
> All in all it would be *way* simpler if I could just write "robocopy ...
> EXTERNAL:\Backup /MIR".
>
Not sure, but it may just fail if you try to mount to a non-empty 
folder. Alternatively, what it might do is create a logical 
concatenation of the contents, i.e., what ever is there will stay, but 
doing a listing of the directory will give you what is there *and* what 
is in the mounted drive. But, yeah, having the contents go unavailable, 
if not empty, is one possibility.

That said.. assuming you are running the commands in a script, I suppose 
there might be some way to check if the mounted folder has some 
attribute that shows it is actually a mount, but.. no clue how you would 
do that. :p I just thought the thing was interesting enough, especially 
if I needed to do it at some point, to hunt down what, if any, solutions 
existed.

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