Basic External Drive Backup for Windows Restore

[techrawks]

I'm trying to setup an external backup system for my computer with at least 2TB of space min. for my Win8 system. I bought Buffalo NAS and TowerRaid NAS but they're both Unix based and when doing a full system image backup I get a file transfer error ("the version does not support this version of the file format") that requires me to mess with the smb.conf which I've tried getting access to but they have it on lockdown: http://blogs.technet.com/b/asiasupp...ort-this-version-of-the-file-format-quot.aspx

The NAS also seems to come with software that adds more stuff like media sharing, etc. that I don't need. I just want to do system image backups of my system and be able to do a restore from a Windows backup utility if I can't get back in. With the NAS I've bought seems I'd need to be in Windows already and have the software installed to access the backup.

So I think I just need a simple basic external drive that can handle 2TB+ that can be plugged in if booting from a Windows system recovery mode to do a restore that doesn't need all this other extra software to access the data and can handle VHD sparse files so I don't get the error above during backup. Are there any recommendations or reviews of something like that?

 

[kbp]

USB-3 hard drive caddy.
I use an Aluratek setup run thru my router.

 

[Elixer]

Windows backup utility ? Why do you want to use that, there are better programs for doing backups that work well with the NAS that you got.
Acronis, maximum reflect, and many others.

The NAS you have might also have RAID 1 (or..., it depends on how many HDs it has in it), but usually, people get NAS if they want to access the files on it from multiple machines.