I’ve just bought a 1.5TB My Book Elite. I installed the WD Smartware software, and started to back up my laptop. Out of the 450GB hard drive, I only use 65Gb. But Smartware thinks I’ve got 27GB to backup, and away it went. That was 6 hours ago, and it’s just crawling past the 18.5GB mark, and its actually slowing down. At this rate, I doubt it will finish by tomorrow morning. What the hell is going on?
To make matter even worse, I intended to use this device to back up my partner’s computer as well. I use Windows 7, but she has Windows Vista. I strongly suspect I have no chance at all of successfully doing this.
When I look at the contents of the WD G:\ drive using Windws Explorer, I see several directories with names like “5C2F34DA644474B9F6BFB0E7B01D” . Within these, there are other directories called “C_”. And inside these, there are yet other directories, similar to what’s on my laptop’s hard drive. Why are they duplicated? Why doesn’t it just back up my files to a single root directory called “Gary’s Computer”, or somethng simple?
Smartware uses it’s own method to backup and does use a lot of system resources. I only used it once and uninstalled it. I don’t know how it will work backing up 2 different PCs either. What kind of backup do you want to do just selected files or the whole drive or partition? I use the paid version of this http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&wdc_lang=en This is a stripped down and updated version so I don’t know it it will work for want you want or not. It’s intended more for cloning drives. The best way to use it is to make the rescue disk and boot from that and backup from there.
An update: This morning, 16 hours after I started to backup 27GB, it had done 21.5GB. This is unacceptable. I stopped it, and powered down. It’s going back into the box, and I’ll be returning it for store credit tomorrow. Later tonight, I will attempt to uninstall the software. I work in the IT industry, and I have a strict zero-tolerance policy on hardware failures, and this means two more people will never buy any WD product again. The PBEE ( Product to Brand Escalation Embargoes ) method is the only way we can encourage manufacturers to improve quality.
