I guess many photographers bought My Passport Wireless mainly to backup their work in the field, The manual had next to no details on this function. I certainly had this trouble and spent hours to work that out. For what it is worth may I offer to post what I found for anyone who might be interested.
Use the camera to format the SD card before taking pictures
Power up My Passport Wireless
Insert SD card and press WPS button
WPS light flashes white (transferring)
Flashing stops when contents completely recorded
On the PC: on SD Card Imports the name of the SD card and under that, the date of the backup, with the whole structure of the SD card.
Further backup on the same day will add only the new additions and therefore takes less time
Further backup on later days will have a new entry of the new dates with only the new additions
Yes, thank you for your post. I am also a new user (just unboxed it today and am reading the manual). So please correct me if I’m wrong in what I say below.
I think this is what you mean in step 6: When you get back to your PC, connect the My Passport Wireless (MPW) to your PC using the USB cable. This mounts the device as an external drive. Now you can simply navigate to the folder(s) containing the photos you captured in the field and import them onto your computer’s hard drive.
If you are away from home for several days, back up your SD card each night. Just insert the SD card into the MPW and press the WPS button. This transfers only your new photos to the MPW. That is, it does an incremental update. I travel with two cameras and several SD cards. I never reformat an SD card until my photos are safely imported obto my PC. Otherwise, you are risking having no backup if something happens to the MPW.
I don’t travel with a laptop but I do take an Android tablet. After I back up files from the SD cards onto the MPW, I’d like to check the contents from the tablet. I installed the WD My Cloud mobile app but was surprised to see that there was no simple way to browse the contents of the MPW. According to the manual, “Besides using the computer to check the files from an SD card, you can also do it with the WD My Cloud mobile app. To use the mobile app, you must sync the content onto the My Passport Wireless drive first.” But nowhere in the manual does it explain what it means by “sync the content onto the My Passport Wireless.” Anybody know?
Hi Volante found your post and am struggling with same issues, works sometimes, sometimes not, then I figured out it was working just incrementing files not creating a new file each time I put the same card in again after another day ( I dont run a card till filled but rotate them so limiting risk of failure and corruption with 100’s of images on it) … I take up to seven SanDisk Extreme Pro 95mb/s SD cards on a trip and rotate them so I never delete the files till I am home and load into Lr.
Is this what youi guys understand is how it works, there is so little info on the basic card download.
Sorry I am a bit late John because I had not checked on this forum for a long time. Away again!!!
You can verify the backup on your Android device via My Cloud in the field. I use Samsung Galaxy Tablet S2 and had no problem. My Passport Wireless is a good appliance but the " manual " is diabolical, especially when they use jargon like “sync the content”. It would be clearer if they say it like this:
1.Turn on your tablet
2.Turn on WiFi on your tablet
3.Turn on MPW
4.Press the WPS button
5.Check to make sure MyPassport is on the WiFi list on the tablet. Connect it.
6.Open My Cloud
7.Tap upper left “all”
8 Tap “SD Card Imports”
9.All your SD cards are there.
Please refer to my previous reply to John. Yes the subsequent backup is the incremental bits only. It saves a lot of time. The original backup and subsequent ones are all there, higher up on the column.
You will find all your number of cards are all there, like “SanDisk_SD234G_e678”
I spent one month in Patmos away from town, no wifi, but My Passport Wireless connected to my tablet with no problem.
