Just got a new My Book Essential 2T Saturday night. I did the firmware and Smartware updates before doing any backups. I don’t have to tell you all what it did to my machine. That is well documented here. What I do not find is any solutions in a month and a half of postings. Am I missing something? BTW I have a Gateway 3.?? MHz 1.5G Ram XP machine.
I do have a laptop too with Win 7Pro. I used its Backup to the Book via my LAN, and though it took what seemed like a long time, at least it worked and did not totally bog down the laptop.
Funny thing is, I bought a Seagate product at Sams Club. As soon as I tried to install it, it had some 3rd party cripleware backup software that would only do the C drive. I have multiple partitions. So I never tried it or installed the software when given the option of that or a trial version of the other program. So I took it back for the WD drive because I thought their software did multiple drives. It appears to…if the machine wasn’t a total dog. Well for now, Smartware is uninstalled and I just copy all the folders from the partitions since they change rarely. It is kind of sad to have to do it that way. Sure hope WD gets this fixed very soon since it has been so long.
Besides time to do, the software seems to take over a lot of the processor time and memory even when I think I stopped it. It is what most are complaining about right?
I gave on trying to use the SmartWare software that came with my WD drive a couple months ago. I tried some other back up software programs that were mentioned, then realized that my old software that I used to backup to my tape drives would work with the WD drive, so I went back to that.
A weekly backup now takes about 20 minutes. When I had the SmartWare software running, it took over my memory and took 3 full days (with almost no PC activity on my part) to do the first backup. I don’t think it ever finished an incremental backup for the couple months that I had it running on my computer. I finally found that I had to stop it any time I wanted to do any work at all, so it pretty much defeated the purpose of having it. And, then I went to copying the files I wanted to save manually. Again, that defeated the purpose of having backup software that will do automatic backups for you.
It’s a nice idea but doesn’t seem to work as intended. At least, for me and many others who have posted messages.
If you want a good backup system, look elsewhere. The system I use, “BackupMyPC” by StompSoft, is no longer sold or I would highly recommend it. I’ve used it for many years.
There are threads here with recommendations for other software, so you can try others until you find what works for you. A friend of mine uses TimeMachine for the Mac and I see there is a PC version available though I couldn’t find good specs on it other than bullet points. There are lots of others out there so do a search and see what will work for you. There doesn’t seem to be any movement from WD on making their software more useable or resolving the many things about it that don’t work well.
I’m sure wd is trying to make it better, but… if you have windows xp, vista, or 7, you can use windows backup. it’s not continuous backup, but it can be scheduled or manually started. continuous backup will always tend to use resources, but smartware shouldn’t be using up your resources.
