Backing up an external hard drive with a second external hard drive

Hello, I have several external hard drives that I use regularly (one each for TV shows that I watch, my wife watches, movies, photos, etc.). They’re all western digital My Book Essentials and all are in working order. I want to back up the external hard drives to antoher external hard drive using the western digital smartware. However when I go to the backup tab to select the files to backup, all that is displayed is my desktop PC. I explored around couldn’t find my external hard drive in the smartware software, is it not possible to back up an external with a second external? They’re all in working order and everything so there’s no problem there. Thand you all!

Hello,

WD Smartware will not allow you to backup a external drive to another external drive if they both came with Smartware.

Using WD Smartware you can use a non Smartware drive as the source for the backup. But it will not allow you to use a drive that came with Smartware as the source.

Can I reformat one of the drives with a program other than smartware? if so would it be the backup drive I reformat or the original drive? (obviously reformatting would delete all the info so I’d clear the drive first then return the files to it). Or is my only option buying an external drive from another company? Seems strange they make it so that can’t happen, you’d think WD would want you to use only their drives! lol