First off I’ve noticed the back up created with smartware saves the entire back up as hidden files. I found this a little annoying since I was thinking while I had all my data from my main pc backed up, I could browse these same files on my network. I suppose an alternative is to just create a share on my internal HD’s on my main pc?
Is there a way to unhide these files? It’d be nice to go through and delete files I don’t want backed up anymore.
Also how fast is this backup supposed to be? I’ve had it going 2 days now and it’s got 750GB copied out of 1.2 TB. Does this sound right? I have the only copy when pc is in sleep mode clicked OFF.
Thats enough questions for now, thanks in advance for any help!
Also my router is a Belkin N 1 Gigabit router…the NIC on my PC is also gigabit. I’d expect it to be a bit faster?I just checked my resource manager in Windows 7 and it’s showing the mybooklive process at 3,000,000 bits per second or 3MB…terribly slow!
Also have another weird problem. The size of the backup seemed to be right at first…985GB…then it moved up to 1.2 TB even though only 932GB are used up on my 1.5 TB drive. NOW all of a sudden it shows 950GB of 1.79TB…so it’s backing up 1.79TB of data when I’m only using 932GB on my PC drive. I must have a setting on what it’s backing up incorrect?
This software and drive is just whacky…what the heck gives? I’m seriously thinking of just returning it…
Well since I can’t find any solutions it’s going back to the store. Final review is it’s slow, the back up software **bleep**, it’s not compatible with windows back up from what I can tell which forces you to use WD’s crappy software (windows 7 doesn’t list it as an option for a backup point). I would’ve felt a bit more confident in windows 7 software doing the backup. Also from what I’ve researched WD’s drives fail more often compared to other brands…making it a poor choice for a “back up”.
Overall this thing **bleep**. I’m getting a normal exernal drive…didn’t have choice on this since it was a gift. lol Just hoping Best Buy takes the paper weight back!
Well if I could get some help here it might save me from having to bring this thing back…I tried copy/pasting a bigger file to the drive and it was 24 MB a second which is decent.
The backup is still whacky. I stopped the backup for a while. Restarted it and now it says partial backup complete. But then again it goes and starts to backup 900 GB but says only 68GB isn’t backed up yet. Overall the backup software is just crappy. I don’t want my 2TB drive filled up backing up 950GB of data!!! Also the backup process for some reason is slooow, getting 3MB/s.
learning to decipher the smartware layout takes a while. When you “restart” a backup, it shows you how much data on your PC you have to be backed up, total, no the “haven’t gotten to it yet” portion. If you’ve already backed up a bunch of that earlier, then yes you’ll only have a small portion left. Just let it run. when it’s done the “colored bar columns” will match each other and the button (this is in the backup tab) will say “stop backup”. This means that yes you’ve copied over everything, and yes it will continue to back up any new or modified files, but click stop if you no longer want to be backing up files.
Also, re: disk space, if you have the option set to keep more than one generation of backups, your total size used would surpass the total size of data to be backed up from your PC. Go into the smartware settings and double check the “versions” info.
lastly, there is a smartware forum in the software subforum of the WD boards, I’ve found that more helpful for smartware issues.
