Deleting an old backup

I want to delete an old backup from a 2Tb My Passport Ultra drive and start afresh. I read on the forum that all I need to do is to delete the WD Backup.swstor folder and then create a new backup. I tried this but right near the end of the deletion it cam across some files that had names that were too long to be deleted. How can I get rid of these? Will I need to reformat the drive and if so how do I go about reinstalling the software on it?

There isn’t any software “installed” on it, those files are just copies of the install files if you want to install the WD software on your machine (it would be daft to make you download files from the WD website when they’re selling you a storage device that can be shipped with them already copied onto it). If you want to keep them, just copy them off onto your HD or another drive, do the format and then copy them back. Or if you prefer they can be downloaded from the WD website.

But if the filenames are too long, you can maybe try the old fashioned DOS command prompt and see if you can do it from there, or perhaps map a drive to one of the folders lower down in the tree structure and then go through that to delete the files (by virtually shortening their name by chopping out part of the directory tree).

Menu thanks for your reply. I did try navigating to individual files with the object is renaming them with shorter names but it wouldn’t let me do that. However, I noticed that the WD Backup.swstor folder only takes up about 25kb of memory so for now I’ve just renamed it and started a new backup.
Doea this software only run the backup associated with the profile that’s currently logged on? I have two profiles, an old one I don’t use any more plus the one in current use. The old one still has a backup plan in place though so should I delete it? I don’t want it to try and backup everything twice!

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S5 - powered by Three

It will back up what you tell it to, and what it has access to. So my expectation would be just the current profile’s files, unless you’ve made suitable access arrangements otherwise (and set WD Backup to access and back them up).

Personally I don’t use WD Backup (I use WD Smartware, as my backup target is my MyCloud Mirror NAS drive) so I’m not able to easily test (I have a MyPassport too but it’s full of media so I haven’t got room to drop a test backup onto it without major file rearrangement).

Menu thanks for your reply. I did try navigating to individual files with the object is renaming them with shorter names but it wouldn’t let me do that. However, I noticed that the WD Backup.swstor folder only takes up about 25kb of memory so for now I’ve just renamed it and started a new backup.
Doea this software only run the backup associated with the profile that’s currently logged on? I have two profiles, an old one I don’t use any more plus the one in current use. The old one still has a backup plan in place though so should I delete it? I don’t want it to try and backup everything twice!

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S5 - powered by Three

It’s completed the backup but with a warning message and a list of some files that failed to backup. Any idea why some files would fail to backup? They’ve always backed up OK previously.
Would WD Smartware be a better backup application to use than WD Backup? Is it free?
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S5 - powered by Three

It may have trouble to back up files that are in use (locked by another application) or perhaps too large (Smartware tends to postpone those to later when the machine is less busy, so Backup may do something similar if your machine was busy and the backup timed out before they could be done). If you look in the logs you may get more information as to why (I would suspect files being in use).

For your case Backup is probably the preferred solution (it was designed specifically to work with USB drives). The basic Smartware is free (the pro version needs a license, although that license comes free with the purchase of the MyCloud NAS drives), but as I said it’s more designed for networked backup.

Yes, my first thought would be that the files were in use but that wasn’t the case. The only application open was WD Backup. Maybe I should format the drive, make sure the software is fully updated and try the backup again?

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S5 - powered by Three

Just because Backup is the only application open doesn’t mean it’s the only one that’s running or accessing files. Windows runs many services and such in the background (archiving, indexing etc) plus things like Anti-Virus can also come into play to lock out files. Indeed even if a file is opened in an application and then closed down, it can take some considerable time before the closed application finally finishes up, clears out of memory and releases everything.

I’d suggest to reboot your computer and try again to back up those specific files that got missed, without opening any other application (including Windows Explorer) up first before WD Backup.