I purchased a “MY Passport Essential” with the understanding from the salesperson at “Best Buy” that I could very easily backup all of my pictures. Needless to say Me thinks I had a little smoke blown up you know where. My initial backup of my data gave me a great backup of all the files that came with my dell when I purchased it. Those are the sample pictures, sample music and sample everything. Scanning the faq’s on the WD web site it appears that there is additional (hardware/software) needed in order to accomplish what I want to do. Am I correct in my assumption??
any and all help or suggestion would be appreciated. right now Im thinking of returning to product to “BEST BUY” and getting my 80.00 back. Is there a reliable backup drive out there in the market place that anyone know s about.
As soon as you connect your “My Passport” Essential USB drive to your computer it should be recognized as a drive on your operating system. This drive should function basically the same as any other drive on the computer. This means you can use it with any backup software that the operating system uses. (You are using what software? and what operating system?)
I have used My Book and My Passport Essential drives over the last 3+ years with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 and have had no problems. If all else fails you can simply copy the files you want to back up, to your attached drive. It appears that WD may recently have started including some backup software with the Essential drives. If you are using software like that you probably want to look at the sofware to see what files are set to be backed up.
Windows 7 has a backup utility that may be used also.
Are you using the Smartware that came with the drive? I used it for one backup and uninstalled it. Maybe some Sync software would be beter for you mMS has a free one called Sync Toy. Basically you clicl on the folder on your PC and select the folder at backup site and they become the same.
Today I went formated the drive and eveything worked out just fine. cant explain it but at least the product will stay in my home for a while longer. thanks to all for the fast response to my problem
