Unfortunately the hard disk on my Mac Mini died. Fortunately I had been backing everything up using WD Smartware to my WD My Book for Mac.
Or so I thought.
When I replaced the hard disk on my Mac Mini, I figured I would just copy the backed up files from the My Book over to my Mac Mini using “Finder” - literally a copy/paste exercise. Well, unfortunately WD Smartware appends to the filename (e.g. “@0”, “@1”, etc) for version control. This means that restoring a 230GB iTunes library with hundreds of playlists is a waste of time, since my library doesn’t recognize any of the files. If I re-import them, then none of my playlists work and they have to be recreated.
Ok, so instead I take out the WD Smartware software disc, install the software, and click “Retrieve Backup”. I follow the instructions from the WD Knowledge Base online. Well, the first step is clicking the “Retrieve” tab in Smartware and then clicking on the volume you want to restore from. Yet there is no volume listed for the data on the My Book. I know the files are there because, as mentioned above, I can grab them through “Finder” using OS X. Also, on the first “Home” tab within Smartware, I can see that my 230GB of files are on the My Book, leaving the remainder of the 1TB drive free.
Couldn’t find any solutions in the WD Knowledge Base or this Community. Any suggestions out there?
So I called WD Support. Spoke to three different people, and it was a complete waste of time. Interestingly, I actually had to educate them on the fact that WD Smartware appends the ‘@0’, ‘@1’, etc to the file names for version control. I was not amused that they didn’t know this at all.
Basically they told me that since I couldn’t see the volume in WD Smartware, I’d just have to manually copy the files over through the ‘Finder’ using OSX. Brilliant.
So I went ahead and updated my WD Smartware software to the latest version. Not with the button directly in WD Smartware for updating the software (mind you that I did click that repeatedly, and every time I received a message stating that the software was on the latest version). No, I went to the WD website and downloaded the latest version.
Sure enough, it worked, and I was able to restore using WD Smartware.
And now, I have done a ton of research, and will be backing up my files using CrashPlan online, and Timemachine to my WD My Book locally. Never using WD Smartware again.
