Thanks for escalating. Ok, I realize this is a “user forum”, but there appear to be some WD people here. The “official” answer for support, is most likely to contact WD, and not rely on this forum.
But… as you can see, there are new people in this forum, having come here from doing a Google search on WD Smartware. Having all these complaints available to anyone who searches, can’t be a good thing. As a software developer, if I allowed my software product to be the subject of so much negative public debate for such a long time (without fixing the problems in a timely manner), my company would crucify me. Folks will surely base future hardware purchases on the reputation and reviews they read online. Yes, so far, the hardware works great. The software doesn’t. Buyers won’t separate the two when making decisions.
I also can’t imagine it being cost effective for WD to answer numerous calls from people one-by-one, going thru a bunch of steps on the phone, where the same answers could be posted here. Seems to me, that would save a lot of time on WDs end.
Bottom line: I think WD needs to pay more close attention to the forum, and start to answer people here, or at least keep people informed on what’s happening. This shouldn’t have to go on for months, before someone “escalates” the problem. I get the impression WD doesn’t even think there is a problem.
I have never used any of the other commerical backup products that have been mentioned here, at least not yet. I can only base my opinions on what I see with this software, vs the only other thing on my computer that might be inclined to use as much resources… which is my anti-virus software.
When my anti-virus softrware does its “full scan”, that means it’s finding and actually reading the contents of every single file on my hard disk, looking for patterns, and viruses. If it can do this without significantly hogging resources on my computer, there is no reason your software can’t do the same, because you’re doing very similar things (looking for all files, then copying the ones you decide need to be backed up). And Norton can finish its “full scan” of my entire hard drive in less than an hour.
We’ve all said this for months… even when only a “few” folders and files are selected for backup, your softrware appears to hog the system forever, as if it’s constantly looking for ANY file in the entire system (whether its marked for backup or not). System files, like “profile” files or “cache” files IE and Firefox use, should never even be looked at. And the responses we’ve heard from WD about “SQL Lite not allowing us to delete files”, and “this software is working as designed” is nonsense. This “try uninstalling and re-installing the software” is also not acceptable, because as someone else pointed out, it’s also a WD software problem.