I use a My Passport with 1TB capacity, same as my pc. Currently the pc has used 211GB, but the Passport has stored 986! I thought it was set up to follow my changes; that is, when I add or delete files, the Passport does the same. When I looked at the files in the Passport, they correctly show what I had asked to store there, chiefly photos, docs and music. I’m not aware of duplicates. What’s going on? Thanks very much.
It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. If you delete a file on your PC, the file remains in your backup until it ages out. If it was deleted from your backup as well, then, well, it wouldn’t be much use as a backup.
Thanks Tony! I looked in more detail at what was on my Passport and found that is has 252 GB for photos, twice what I have in the pc (but as far as I can tell, there aren’t any duplicate folders). It also has 181 GB of documents, my pc has only 2.3GB. I can safely say that I’ve never had a total of 181GB of documents. The space attributed to one user on the passport is 425 GB, over 3.8 million files, but that user on the pc takes up 6.6 GB, 18,000 files. I have a hard time seeing this as the normal function of the passport. Do you have other thoughts?
What are you using to do the backups?
It’s a WD My Passport 0748, 1TB drive, running WD Smartware v. 2.4.16. Looking at the File History I now see that it is set to keep 5 backups for each file. I can see where that may account for some of the excess, but I don’t get the 3.8 million file backup of a 17,900 file original.
I also do a separate backup on another hard drive once a week.
Was this resolved? I’m interested as I have the same issue. I understand why a drive would fill up, but haven’t found anything in the drive documentation about releasing space when the drive is getting full.
Jill, I resolved it by making sure I had another good backup and then formatting my WD drive, erasing everything. Felt great! Now using Win 10, which is supposed to do what the WD drive said it would do; i.e., keep a continuous backup and delete old files as space is needed.
Thanks, David. I upgraded to Windows 10 a few months ago but never got round to checking out the features. Did you use Windows to format the drive or WD Erase? Did you bother to restore the WD software and disk image?
I formatted the drive using Windows, so far haven’t done anything with the WD drive (I’m using a newer WD drive for the continuous backup now). I may use the older one for one-time backups.
BTW, I can’t say I’m a huge fan of Win 10, but it’s backup feature is really nice, very easy to set up.
Open your WD Passport. Click on the arrow alongside "Backup. Choose the option to delete the old backups to free space.
