Smartware "drops" visibility to My Passport Ultra drive

Hi.  I’m running Smartware Pro 2.4.10 (aka 2.4.10.17) on Windows Vista.
After rebooting Smartware Pro will recognize the passport drive and appear to backing up everything fine.
Several hours later, usually overnight, Smartware Pro will “drop” or lose visibility to the passport drive as a Backup Target.

Smartware Pro will not see the drive as a backup target even if I stop and start the software, or disconnect and reconnect the drive.    Only rebooting will enable it to see the drive.

I recently updated the firmware and de-installed and re-installed Smartware to deal with another issue where Smartware pro just stopped backing up new files.

Hi there and welcome to the WD community.

Before uninstalling the software, did you experience the same issue with the drive not showing on Smartware?

No, I didn’t experience this issue before.

I’ve had the drive for a year or so, and it seemed to be working fine until a few weeks ago I noticed no new files were being backed up.