Is my Passport Ultra doing a full backup or incremental. I have it scheduled for hourly backups. Each backup set has several zip files per day. Not every hour. Each zip file is a different size. Doesn’t look to me to be full backups. Wouldn’t they be mostly the same size? Not 209 g and the next 89 g. For the last few months I haven’t been adding or deleting hardly anything. Mostly email downloads. I need to figure out what I have to do to free up space when the drive fills up.
Hi,
Depends on the software; WD Smartware or WD Backup.
With Smartware you have option of Category or Frequency of backup. In both cases you can select either Continuous or Scheduled backups. I’m not clear on this whether it is incremental or full backup. It appears to be that only changed files are backed-up, which would be incremental. Check the Help tab for details. Also you can de-select whatever does not really need backing up to free up space!
With Backup you do not have Category option; only Frequency, but you can select which files to include. Also, you can select an older backup to recover a file or folder that may have been deleted on the PC. Again, you can de-select whatever you don’t need to backup and so free up space.
I was having trouble on my passport, so I de-selected the Program areas in the C: drive and also “downloaded” files. Works for me.
Cliff
Cliff, What you are describing is how to slow down the filling up of the drive. My concern is, when the drive is full and won’t back up any more files how do I select files to manually delete? I would think to choose the oldest backup. But if the backups are incremental that means to me that the first backup was the complete list of selected files to backup. There after only new or changed files are backed up. Maybe after three months of backups the drive is running out of space and there are dozens of backup sets. So if I select the oldest to delete does the catalogue know that old files that haven’t changed are now missing and does a new backup? If after deleting backups and I need to restore, will everything I need be on the backup drive?
