A friend and I each have a large external hard disk on our home PCs
that we use for backup.  Is there a way we can each map a drive to the
other person's external hard drive and use it for backup purposes? 
That is, I currently back up my C: drive to a local external hard
disk.  I would also like to be able to back it up to a friend's
external hard disk in another city.  And he would like to do the same
backing up to my PC's external disk.  We are both running XP
Professional and have Qwest DSL.

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 28 Feb 2006 00:01 PST

cogswellia...

It seems to me that you can use just about any P2P filesharing
program that allows you to enter your friend's IP address and
thereby connect to their hard drive.

A few that come to mind:

Aimini P2P
http://www.aimini.com/news/index.html

Skype
http://www.skype.com/help/faq/filetransfer.html

SimpleServer
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/sswww.htm

You might need to disable (or configure) the built-in XP
firewall on both your machines (something I know nothing
about), but beyond that, it should be fairly simple.

Let me know where this takes you...

sublime1-ga

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 28 Feb 2006 01:19 PST

Windows Live Foldershare looks interesting, too:
https://www.foldershare.com/

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Clarification of Question by cogswellia-ga on 01 Mar 2006 20:57 PST

sublime1,
Both your suggestions look good to me and I will try them.  Either
skype or foldershare look to me like they should work.

Please post it as the answer and get paid.
Thanks

cogswellia...

Thanks for confirming my suggestions as a suitable answer.
I'll repost them here for the sake of future readers.

------------------------------------------------------------

It seems to me that you can use just about any P2P filesharing
program that allows you to enter your friend's IP address and
thereby connect to their hard drive.

A few that come to mind:

Aimini P2P
http://www.aimini.com/news/index.html

Skype
http://www.skype.com/help/faq/filetransfer.html

SimpleServer
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/sswww.htm

You might need to disable (or configure) the built-in XP
firewall on both your machines (something I know nothing
about), but beyond that, it should be fairly simple.


I'm glad to have had the opportunity to be of assistance.

sublime1-ga

I think what your trying to say is you want to be able to access there
computer and back it up?

You have those types of programs to do it yes but there are also
others that com standard with windows like Netmeeting or simply use a
messenger service

however if your trying to say u want to back up your c: to there
external and there c: to yours? why not just borrow each others
external harddrive and back up?
If you need more help and do not get an Answer on Google Answers, Why
not Visit my site as it is Tech Support site and you can Ask for free
:-)

Cheers
Danny
http://killerz-tech.net  - All you Computing Support/Help Needs.....

Here's a thought - 
If you can connect to each other using FTP (File Transfer Protocol - a
communication protocol that enables fast(er) transfers), you could set
up your systems so you can schedule (using Task Scheduler and a simple
Windows batch file script) a transfer of the .bkf file (assuming
you're using the Windows backup solution) that you create locally on
your own external drives.
This would involve setting up FTP server services on both your
machines (since you need to back up to each others' systems), which is
available through Windows XP at no cost. Then the usage of either the
Windows XP FTP client (with a corresponding Windows batch file), or a
third-party FTP client(there are those that allow you to schedule
transfers) will get you up and running.

Note #1: Some ISPs disable the FTP on their networks to prevent bulk
traffic clogging up their routes. In such an event, other solutions
can be considered, but I'd strongly recommend FTP for it's ease of use
and speed if it is available.

Note #2: You may already have considered this, but it may not be
reliable to be backing up to a remote _external_ hard drive, since
it's intended purpose (portability) may mean that it is not always
available to back up to or restore from. That said, I am also sure
that you understand that depending on the size of the data involved,
that you will be using a significant amount of your available
bandwidth during the backup process.

If you're interested in them, there are third party solutions that
allow you to backup data online, such as www.ibackup.com - they
specialize in these activities and will have their own (software)
clients and optimized service networks.

This is a good resource to facilitate understanding of how FTP works: 
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/IIS3/iischp9.mspx

Note that the services mentioned, included the 'IIS service' can be
configured on Windows XP, and will require to be installed using
Add/Remove Windows Components applet in the Control Panel, with the OS
CD in your optical drive.