It looks like when I do a backup to my external hard drive, the process does not delete files that were deleted on the source drive since the last backup.
For example:
Say my laptop contains files named 1, 2, 3 and 4. I do a backup, and all four files are backed up to my external hard drive. At some later point in time, I have no need for file 3, so I delete it from my laptop. When I do my next backup to my external hard drive, I want it to “mirror” the contents of laptop, ie, I don’t want file 3 to be on the backup.
The thing is, I’ve spent a few hours going through my hard drive cleaning it up, getting rid of old files that I don’t want. Sure - maybe I’ll discover that I do want one of those files, and then I’ll be glad to be able to recover it from my backup. BUT… the whole point of a backup is not to recover files that you’ve mistakenly deleted. The point of a backup is to restore your whole system when some disaster occurs, like your machine is stolen or it dies. In this case, I’d like to restore it to how it looked at the time of the disaster. I don’t want to get back all of the old files that I spent hours purging from my system, forcing me to go through that whole purging process again.
If I delete a file by mistake, I’m prepared to suffer the consequences of that or maybe get it back from the recycle bin.
How do I do a Sync? I’ve googled it and there are references to a “My Cloud storage device” - I don’t know what that is. I have a WD MyPassport Ultra external hard drive.
If you do a restore of the MOST RECENT backup, it WON’T restore the files you’ve deleted.
In order to restore a file that was previously deleted, you have to restore that file from a prior backup set.
That’s how ALL proper backups / restores work. Now, I wouldn’t swear to it since I don’t use WD’s backup software (I use Acronis TrueImage). But if WD’s doesn’t behave that way, then I wouldn’t classify their software as proper backup software.
There’s numerous free Sync tools (Microsoft’s Sync Toy, FreeFileSync, etc) if you want to experiment with those.
Did you find the answer to this issue? I am wondering what it the fix to this, to delete the unwanted deleted files from the source hard disk so WD shall update the latest instance during back up.
