I use a WD My Passport because of its small size and especially because of its native hardware encryption. I frequently travel with the drive so I have no consequential concern if it is lost or stolen. Although I also have Seagate Backup Plus drives I do not use them because they cannot be encrypted.
I do not like the WD Smartware and think it could be easily improved to be much more friendly and provide some both useful and nice to know information while a backup is being made. I would have liked to send WD some direct feedback but dissappointingly there is no real or convenient provison to send an email with product feedback. Nevertheless I hope someone in WD sees my comments below and forwards them for consideration.
I only use the drive to backup both my main (C:) SSD and an internal (D:) HDD used for bulk storage. My backups are made on demand, not via a schedule or continuously. They are essentialy a snapshot when I feel it necessary to make a new backup. I also always backup both internal drives at the same time. Although WD Smartware works, it could be much more user friendly for making on demand snapshots of two or more drives and it would be nice if the display provided more useful information about the backup currently being made.
Specifically:
-Although I always back up both the C: and D: drive I can only specify one drive to back up so the backup of the second drive has to be manually started after the first completes. This is annoying and inconvenient because the backups are typically started at the end of the day and it it is necessary for someone, during the night, to start the backup of the second drive. Seagate allows specifying all recognized drives when using their Backup Plus drives so there is no reason the Smartware software also cant do this. Also, since there is not always someone to start the second drive during the night it is typically a two day job to make a simple backup.
-Making a snapshot backup can be brute forced but it is not straight forward or convenient because Smartware is short sightedly only written to make either continuous or scheduled backups. There is no third option like Seagate has by providing a “Snapshot” button and the ability to simply turn off both continuous and scheduled backups.
-The information displayed when a backup is in progress is worthless and confusing. The only two statistics provided, “Data Backed Up” and “Files Not Backed Up” never seem to even come close to accurately providing useful information. I would like to see the following:
–An accurate indication indicating progress like total number of files or GB to be backed up and the number of files or GB remaining.
–Estimated time to completion.
–Average data transfer rate.
Other similar softawre provides this information in an understandable format so there is no reason the WD cannot do this also.
The Passport is a great product but we purchased and use the Seagate products (when encryption is not needed) because their software, although not great, is much more friendly and useful to use.
