These are the results of my initial testing of the new version 2.2.1.6 SmartWare.
My computer and network configuration hasn’t changed since I observed the well documented issues, my personal experience also, with earlier versions of 2.x. I mention this because the baseline should be the same for judging the testing metrics and results. I have two 1TB MyBookLive Drives (named MyBookLive and MyBookLive02) on my network; connected to my NetGear WNDR4500 Router’s Gigabit Ethernet Ports. Both drives are still on version 02.42.02-012 Core F/W. The computer I use and ran the test from is connected wirelessly through the 2.4Ghz band at 450Mbps.
Yesterday, I downloaded and installed the new software. It was a clean install since I’d uninstalled the previous version due to the not backing up new files issue, completely cleaned my hard drive and registry, and then did an install from the downloaded file. I went through the preparation and setup, set the drive named MyBookLive as the target, provided the login information, selected category backup, and left it on continuous backup, but didn’t enable backups. After a restart I launched SmartWare, enabled Backups, and the backup process started. It showed 12199 files, 12.84GB, to backup. The backup seemed to be progressing very slow and after checking my network discovered that somehow the wireless adapter on my computer had selected the 5GHz network, not the 2.4Ghz network I normally use. I left it alone and let the backup complete. It took 2 hours and 8 minutes to complete. That is roughly 1 hour longer for the same amount and distribution (photos, documents, E-mail, Movies, and Other) of data than earlier versions of SmartWare 2.x.
Since I had the weird issue with my setup using the 5Ghz band and to make sure that issue hadn’t caused the slow backup, I uninstalled SmartWare, completely cleaned my hard drive and registry, and then did an install from the downloaded file following the same setup as previously mentioned. After a restart I launched SmartWare, enabled Backups, and the backup process started. It showed 12201 files, 12.88GB, to backup. This time there were no weird network problems, my PC used the 2.4Ghz network, but the backup still took 2 hours and 15 minutes.
This version is clearly slower for an initial backup than the previous versions, by 1 hour in my case. I seem to remember this happened once before and WD corrected the problem, but it was much slower then and the initial backup was taking 3-4 hours for roughly the same amount of data.
This afternoon I added 2 photos via Photostream. Smartware found the 2 photos and added them to the backup file on the MyBookLive.
I just checked and SmartWare has already added the Word Document I used for the write-up while I was typing it. So far, it looks like this version of SmartWare is working. Sure hope the initial backup speed issue can be fixed in the event I have to do a reinstall from scratch. Sure hope SmartWare is finally fixed and useable for the long run!!!
One thing I’ve also noticed; my non-backup drive (MyBookLive02) stays active (green light) during the complete backup process even though it isn’t the target and being written to. Perhaps this is something that can be fixed too!
If anything changes, I’ll post my observations to this thread; so far so good; except for that too slow thing!!!