HELP! - Duplicates and Triplicates in My Book Office Edition

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HELP! - Duplicates and Triplicates in My Book Office Edition

Hello:

I have a 1 TB Western Digital Hard Drive - My Book Office Edition.  I have the WD Anywhere Backup software installed that automatically keeps your files backed up to the external hard drive.  My problem is that after I owned the hard drive for for about a year and it had been regularly backing up my C drive, I noticed that when I went into the external hard drive all of the files were duplicated at least once or twice. 

It seems like the original file is backed up and named like it is on my C drive and then all the duplicate files have the original name with a string of numbers/info appended to the end of the name.  The duplicate files are exactly the same as the original but instead of having my hard drive backed up once, it is twice or 3 times the size!  See the attached image I uploaded to show you how the folders look inside my hard drive.

In my spare time, I decided to try to delete some of these files that are duplicated and that lasted for about a week.  I probably had wasted over 20 hours and hardly gotten anywhere.  Every single folder is like this and my hard drive in my computer probably has over 300 GB++ of info on it.  There is no way I am going to be able to delete all of this or fix it by hand.  It would take me forever.  I blocked the WD Anywhere Backup software from operating or backing up any more files but now my files haven’t been backed up in quite a while so that’s not good either.

I’m getting ready to do a system recovery and restore my computer in the next couple weeks but I need to fix this issue with my hard drive first, otherwise I am going to copy all those duplicates back onto the computer after I restore.

Does anybody know how to fix this?  Is this something in the settings that got changed that I didn’t realize? I’m a college student and will not be graduating until June and cannot afford to pay that at the moment.  Lots of other bills mounting up from going to school.  If anybody knows an easy way to fix this or keep it from happening again, I would really appreciate the help and thank you in advance.

Jeff

I uploaded a screenshot to show you exactly what it looks like in all of the hard drive folders.  What a mess:

283×739 16.8 KB

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Hello Again:

When doing a search earlier, I did find someone that looks like they were having a problem similar to mine.  I’m not sure if it was my problem exactly or if mine is doing exactly as his is, but it looked like it was similar close.  It looked like a legitimate question and it was nicely asked, so I am wondering why it was locked without a reply being posted why or the fix solution posted below so that others could learn from it or keep from posting the question again themselves??

The post was titled as “Anywhere backup makes two copies of a folder… help please” and can be found by searching “duplicates” or “duplicate files” or that title in itself.

Really curious as to why someone would lock this without letting anybody reply.  Maybe Western Digital realizes the obvious flaw in the software and doesn’t want it being talked about in the forums online?  I would think it would be much easier to fix it instead.

Anyway, love this forum and can’t wait to get a Western Digital for my TV!!

Thanks for any replies.

Jeff

1 Like
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certain threads are close over time for no specific reason

now to your problem,

with WDAB you have the option to keep up to 5 copies of files… this allows you to save the original and the updated file

this feature is optional and can be set to no copies on the settings

try  creating a new backup plan and changing the settings to just one file… see if you still have issues…

if you do… check the drive for errors or corruption