I am planning to buy a WD 2TB Passport Ultra. My wife and I both have a desktop and laptop computer. The 2TB drive is more than large enough to hold our data from the four computers. Can the supplied WD Smart Ware software support and recognize each computer on the one Passport Ultra or do I have to buy a separate backup drive for each computer. Thank You, Larry
You’ll probably be supplied with WD Backup rather than WD Smartware. Smartware is more designed to work with network attached (NAS) drives rather than USB ones. It can back up to a USB drive, but only one directly attached to the computer being backed up (so Smartware on your computer won’t be able to back up to the drive when it’s connected to your wife’s computer, or anywhere else on your network even if it’s shared). WD Backup on the other hand is purpose-designed for local backing up to a directly connected drive like the MyPassport.
What will be possible though is to use either of the software products to do an on-demand backup to the MyPassport directly, and then disconnect it, attach it to the other machine and then do the same there. Each backup will be saved under the name of the computer that it’s from, so the two will not overwrite or interfere with one another.
