I have backed up my laptop regularly to a 500 Gb WD Passport Essential WDBACY5000ARD with WD SmartWare v1.4.5.2. After reinstalling Windows Vista to the laptop, I fail to retrieve the files from the backup drive at least with the original map structure.
On the Home tab of SmartWare, I see the backed-up 220 Gb as “Additional Files”. On the Retrieve tab, nothing is visible in the “Backed Up Volumes” table.
Looking at the Passport drive in Explorer, I see a folder with the name of the laptop in which I find subfolders and then thousands of subfolders containing my files seemingly randomly spread out. There is no way to sort those out manually so I am sure SmartWare is keeping the original folder structure somewhow and that the Retrieve function restores all this.
So, why am I not seeing my backup under the Retrieve tab? I have spent many hours on this including browsing this board but I haven’t found anything that helps.
You can find your files in the backup folder on the external drive. This folder is called “WDSmartware.swstor” and it is located on the root of the drive.
I do not have a “WDSmartware.swstor” on my Passport drive root. This is what I have on the drive root, with hidden files shown:
Extras (folder containing drivers and some other files)
(name of laptop) (folder with the thousands of subfolders I mentioned earlier)
User Manuals (folder with manuals)
WD SmartWare (folder with drivers and some other files)
WD SmartWare for Mac (folder with one file)
MediaID.bin
WD Quick Formatter.exe
WD SmartWare.exe
I apologize - it seems I described the problem incorrectly. Apparently I backed up the computer with the Windows “Backup and restore” function, under the Control Panel - not with SmartWare.
After having used “Backup and restore” I have now recovered everything.
Sorry for the confusion and trouble, and thanks for the help anyway, from someone who is not a computer wizard.
