Design flaws I think cause external ultra to stop backing up

I have two ultra passport external hard drives. The first was smaller, purchased in January 2012, and I used it for monthly back ups of my notebook. It worked great. I used windows back up.

 Then I had a hard drive crash, and used the passport to restore and boy did it! It worked great.

 AND thereafter, would no longer back up.

Oh, I could transfer files but no back up where it created an image and could restore my notebook hard drive.

Then I was sent a passport ultra with a much larger storage.

Same. It backed up great and I did this every week. No issues. Plenty of room left.

Then after about six months, I had a need to restore my notebook (not just files but the system, the hard drive, like before. ONCE AGAIN, the ultra no longer works for back up.

I t hink something happens when you actually use it to restore, that knocks it out of service for future back ups.

I used the windows 7 back up to back up.

This is nothing out of the ordinary. It creates a system image, backs up the hard drive then the libraries.

This passport is still under warranty, but what really burns me is when I sought support, of course they look to blame me for something.

The tech made erroneous assumptions like did I delete the back up. NO.

Help is not very forth coming so one is on one’s own, truly. That is something to think about when buying an external hard drive to back up your system.

I do have restoration disks I made and also disks from HP when I bought my notebook. But the point of the back up is to have your notebook backed up with all your info and the latest downloads for software – hence the image of the hard drive. I think if it doesn’t correctly back up one’s hard drive, it also will stop backing up.

I don’t know if others have had this happen, but it is very eye-opening.

Gina

Tampa

Have you been able to confirm if this issue only affects WD drives? Can you create a new backup by deleting the old one or moving it to another archive hard drive?