# Drive letter change?

**URL:** <https://kopia.discourse.group/t/drive-letter-change/8721>\
**Category:** General Topics\
**Created:** [November 26, 2025, 8:46pm UTC](https://kopia.discourse.group/t/drive-letter-change/8721 "2025-11-26T20:46:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Chiefmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/5daacb/32.png) [@Chiefmas](https://kopia.discourse.group/u/Chiefmas)\
**Post date:** [November 26, 2025, 8:46pm UTC](https://kopia.discourse.group/t/drive-letter-change/8721/1 "2025-11-26T20:46:37Z")

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Hello,

I’ve been using Kopia to backup an external hard drive for a while now, and it works well. However, I had to move the disk to a new machine. I’ve been able to connect the existing repository, but on the new machine, but I had mount it as a different drive letter, so that part of the source path is going to change. From what I read, the drive letter is part of the unique identity, so if I just create a new policy for the disk in the new location, it’s going to re-upload the entire thing? Is it possible for me attach to the existing backup, or will I have to re-do the entire backup?

I’m connecting as the same user/host, but I am starting to think that it might be better to connect as a different user/host so that it gets treated as a shared repository and de-dupe prevents the entire re-upload? Although it sounds like de-dupe might prevent that from happening anyway? Or am I better off just de-running the entire backup? If I do re-do the entire backup, should I just delete the existing repository and create a new one so I’m starting with a fresh disk(the repo is located on a 2nd disk of the same capacity to act as an encrypted mirror/backup).

I don’t care about the drive letter, it’s an extra data disk, I only care about the relative paths starting from the root directory.

Thank you!

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**Author:** ![kapitainsky](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/kopia.discourse.group/kapitainsky/32/535_2.png) [@kapitainsky](https://kopia.discourse.group/u/kapitainsky)\
**Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 6:55am UTC](https://kopia.discourse.group/t/drive-letter-change/8721/2 "2025-11-27T06:55:45Z")

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> [@Chiefmas](#):
>
> it’s going to re-upload the entire thing?

Nope. Deduplication works on files’ content regardless of their location. What will happen is that first snapshot run will be a bit slower as kopia will suspect that those are all new files. It will have to re-scan them all but at the end only metadata (information about new paths) will be saved to repository.