Question: Using Mybook to backup my external photo/movie drive

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for Windows
1

Due to limited capacity of SSD in my laptop, I’m using external WD HDD to store all my photos and HD movies that I captured. I just bought another My Book to hoping backup the all the photo and movies from this HDD, in case it’s damaged or lost during travel. I can’t seems to find a way to setup smartware to backup from external harddrive, though they recognize each other in the software (up to 3 drive, according to super simplified manual).

In summary, is there a way to auto-backup external HDD? Thx in advance.

2

It both drives have smartware you are not able to do it. You need one drive without smartware.

3

Thx.

Both my WD HDD comes with and has smartware on them. So shd I uninstall WD smartware with one external HDD hook to USB, or just delete the smartware folder?

4

Personally I don’t like Smartware. Some type of Sync software might work better for you. Ms has a free one SyncToy and others like GoodSync are try and buy.

Joe

5

actually, I don’t think smartware will let you choose an external drive as a backup source.  so, you won’t be able to use smartware to back up from one external drive to another.  what you can do is just copy and paste the smartware folder from the one drive to the other.  this way you will always have the latest backups when you do that.

6

I uninstalled the WD smartware with one of the HDD(say HDD1) installed. And reinstalled smartware in laptop with HDD2. Unfortunately when I hook up HDD1, it’s still being recognised as WD Passport, and no way to select that as source of backup.

Hi Wayne,

The way I setup is to use one of the external HDD as working drive, due to limited SSD space in laptop. I bought the 2nd external HDD to backup the working drive. I do photo and movie edits on existing folders, and hoping I don’t need to worry about or planned for a process to backup my ‘work’.

The whole purpose of smartware is to let software/system recognize newly added files and back it up, without copying the whole thing again or stopped at anypoint to ask whether to replace. I used to copy and paste, and answered “yes to all”, but after coming back 2hrs later finding the thing stopped at 5% on another yes/no/all prompt at different directory. Also, time taken to copy 500G to 1TB is crazy, and I’m worry of keep repeating will just damage both drive. Is there better solution? Thx.