Add an exampleExtra files/filenames contained in a bacup

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

Hello I’ve had a wd my passport drive now for about 3 years or so and have run into something strange about the last month or so. I have a very large backup. One of the back up folders is over 330 gigs. Now in the last month or so I’ve seen these files that are the same files and names as the files that are being backed up all having the same sizes and stuff but these extra files each have an @ sign with a host of letters and numbers attached to each file name, making it impossible to delete just those files.

Though on the surface it might sound like a virus before you formulate an answer, please keep in mind that I just got a new internal drive in my laptop as the previous one had started to fail and this was about two weeks ago.

I realize that the smartware app is only supposed to back up the files that it sees on the pc but when this happens my music folder on the pc is right now 335 gb and the size of this particular back up folder was 368 gb the last time I saw this occur within the last day or two.

The problem is not occurring now as when I do a new clean backup after formatting the passport everything seems fine. Wondered if anyone here had any thoughts as to what might be causing something like this to happen. Spoke to two folks at Western digital and they cannot pin point this. Thank you. One example of this would be the following:
01 - Homesick@0a97d7bcee0d4431ad9254ae8fc8dbf9

2

Hello,

That’s smartware creating multiple copies when files are modified in any way.

Check on the settings for the software to see how many versions of the files.

1 Like
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Thanks, I would have never have known this. I don’t know why W D couldn’t have given this info to me when I spoke to them yesterday. I see the file history area but cannot change the number of copies as the field shows as read-only. How must I go about changing this? I guess that’s my other question and also what is the best number to use in that setting to prevent the software writing extra files? Thanks again very much.

4

Furthermore how do I then delete only the extra files that smartware has created. I’m very frustrated at the space that these files are always taking up. When I made the last backup they didn’t exist at the beginning but I have about 30 to 40 gb of them now and really don’t know how to proceed. I don’t wish to keep reformatting this drive and doing a new back up every time this occurs. I cannot just find these particular files with wildcard characters. Very frustrating.