Windows backup - dedicated disk

[ianh64]

If I use a dedicated disk (ie a USB drive) for Windows Server backup, can it be used to store multiple backup sets or just the same backup?

ie. Can it hold a one off full backup, but also handle nightly incremental backups of different discs?

Seems like Windows backup options are limited if you don't use a dedicated disc. I was going to use different partitions/shares for different backup types, but Windows backup warns me that it will overwrite any previous backup if I use volume or share based backups.

If I select to use a disk based backup, the implication is that it will reformat the whole drive including the partitions I was planning on using for the incremental backups.

Extra question:
If it can hold different backups, is there anyway of mounting the USB disc in a hyper-v virtual machine and performing a backup of the virtual machine? Hyper-V does not directly support USB devices so it would have to be accessed via the host.

Problem is if I backup the virtual drive on the host, it takes ages as its about 200GB where as an incremental backup from the VM will have much less to backup.

[SYNACK]

Not sure about the rest but for the Hyper-V stuff could you not backup to a mounted VHD stored on the USB disk. VHDs can be accessed and mounted over a network share and would show as raw drives to the host.

[ianh64]

What I do at the moment is mount a share on the virtual machine and backup to that, which gives access to the USB drive from the VM. But as you suggest, creating a virtual hard disc on the USB drive (and I guess sharing to give access to the VM) may allow Windows backup to treat it as a dedicated disc may allow incremental backups to be performed without previous backups being overwritten.

It may also allow me to create virtual drives on the same physical disc without having to dedicate 1.5TB storage to the single backup.

WIll give this a try.