I AGREE with the suggestion to allow removal of the SMARTWARE from the External Drive to allow use of the space.
However, I would continue to use SmartWare if I had a choice to select a simple BACKUP program that takes your entire C:\ drive and backs it up like a mirror image. I even noted that Bill_S made this suggestion to someone who didn’t want to use ShareWare because of its idiosyncracies. I can see the advantage to automatically backing up new files rather than running a backup program once a week.
It also took me awhile to figure out that the ShareWare software that was installed automatically backed up my files using Music, Photos, Documents, Movies, Email, etc as the main Directories on the storage device. I was really hoping that it would have copied ALL my files to a second location without creating a new directory structure. And why create directories with such long alpha-numeric names? Why not call the directories Movies, Music, Documents, Email, etc.? Who creates a meaningless directory name these days?
I also found that while Smartware was first backing up my files, my PC was extremely slow until the backup was complete. There were 4 programs running: WDDMService, WDDMStatus, WD SmartwareBackground Service and WESmartware. The latter two programs used 18–25% and 50-75% of my CPU time. This left me waiting 2 to 3 minutes for my other programs like email to open. I wish someone had told me as I kept clicking on various programs trying to get them to start, and all I got were error messages.
It seems everyone goes through this same problem, but WD has not provided a trail of bread crumbs so that new purchases like myself do not have to go through this frustration.
