I need explanation! Help!

Hello

First of all I want to tell you that I am not a computerexpert, so if I ask a stupid question,. it’s because of this. :wink:

Recently we bought the WD Smart My Book Essential. I installed it and after that I backed up everything from my computer. Now my question is: Should I delete everything from my computer now in order to make it work faster? If yes, will I still be able to find for example old emails, pictures etc? Or do I have to retrieve everytime? I would love my pc to work faster but I have the feeling it works slower since My book is installed. How does this system exectly work?

Thanks a lot guys!

Mariska

I don’t know what you used for backup software. You do not want to trust your data to one physical hardrive. If that dies all the data stored there is gone. Smartware may very well slow down your system if that’s what you are using espicially continuous backup.

Joe

Hi Joe

You are right! It is WD Smartware and it does continuous backup. So what do I do. What can you advise me. Thankl you for responding so fast.

Mariska

It depends on what you are backing up. The whole system or just individual files. Manual or automatic backup. You might try this  http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&wdc_lang=en  I use the paid 2010 version. This version is older and stripped down a bit. It will backup your entire system. I have my PC drive partitioned with os on one and data on the other and image them separately. If you do try this make the rescue disk. I use that disk to boot and do backup from there. Paragon http://www.paragon-software.com/ has free backup software and so does Macrium http://www.macrium.com/ I don’t know if any free ones have have incremental backup. I’ve heard people people speak well of both of those. Then there are sync programs basically you select a file to backup and it compares and makes them the same.

Joe

Hi Joe

Thank you so much for your help, except…I am really not very good with computers, like I wrote in my topic. So what you have replied is for me a little hard to understand. Is it too much to ask if you would be able to tell me this step by step. So what do I do first. I have backed up the whole system and it keeps on backing up with WD SmartWare. Every time when I open the computer I need to type in my password and then I unlock the SmartWare. After that the pc is veeeery slow. So from there I really don’t know what to do. My husband bought this for me in the hope that our pc would become lighter but the way it is now its the opposite. So Joe, if you can help me out…that would be great! Do I need to uninstall the whole SmartWaresystem? And how do I put another software inside My Book Essential? Or am I talking strange now? :wink:

Before you change anything Smartware did not backup the entire computer only certain file types. Remember never have your data on only one physical HD. We need to figure out what kind of backup you need. How big is your My Book and how big is your computer HD? What are you trying to backup? Do you need continous backup like for a business?  Will you run this manually or schedule it? I found this video for the Acronis 2009 that the free WD version is based on see what you think of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrzkqTz2Bk With the WD Acronis program if you had computer problems you could restore your entire computer with this. If you notice there are several videos in this series. Get back to me with a little more info and I’ll try and help you.