New hard drive on my iMac, new external drive

Hello all ! Hoping someone can help me out :slight_smile: I’ve just brought my iMac home after some first aid, in the form of an new hard drive. I have an older 1Tb MyBook Essential(that I never partioned- worked right out of the box on the iMac) that holds the files from the previous computer hard drive along with the smartware software. My new WD external hard drive (4Tb MyBook) has been partioned as per instructions but there is no smartware software.

  • If I reinstall the smartware software from the MyBook Essential what will that do to the data stored on the MyBook Essential? When I plugged the older MyBook into the iMac(after the new hard drive repair), the option for the smartware download was there but I am hesitant to do anything with it in case I lose the only copies of my files.
  • Will I be able to use that software with the new WD MyBook?
  • How do I use the MyBook without the software? I’ve read where you can ‘use’ it without software but that means manually backing up - how the heck do I retrieve the data without software? It’s a rather desparate situation with necessary files I need to work with now and they are all in the external hard drive.

I can’t see a back up being useful if I can’t retrieve the files from either MyBooks. I am not very literate in these matters so some help would be great!

Thanks :slight_smile:

Hello Meesha, welcome to the WD Community, Installing the Smartware on your computer will not affect the information on the drive.

Depending on the My Book you might need to use a different software, please click  here to which My Book you have and what software you need.

You can use the drive without software just as you would with a memory stick. If you used the smartware to backup your computer, you should have a folder that mention the smartware and from there you should be able to get the information, but I recommend using the Smartware to retrieve the files.

Thanks very much! I went ahead and tried to manually retrieve the files, which I was able to do, however, I noticed that only movies and pictures were showing up on MyBook. There should be documents and music as well but they are not there. I did have the smart ware set up to automatically back up my computer and during the process, I have seen that documents were being backed up. Any ideas about what happened?

Apparently, according to the manual, there is no software for this My Book that I am using now, or at least for a Mac.

I will install the smartware from the previous one and see what happens then.

Thanks again :slight_smile:

Hi there, You should have your files on the same location as they were on your Mac. If after installing the previous version of the Smartware you are still not able to get to your files, I would recommned you to  Contact Support.

Well, now I can’t even find the software for the Essential. I have managed to retrieve some files from the Essential via Lightroom 5 but can’t find them on the hard drive in other photo applications. I have tried to export the files to my Mac hard drive but it can’t seem to find the files on the My Book. This is a complete mess. I have done everything I am supposed to in regards to backing up my files but if I can’t access them, they are lost to me. If I had known that even backing up to an external hard drive would mean 10,000 photos would still be lost, I never would have purchased one, let alone two. Not very happy with WD right now. I have two two hundred dollar paper weights and thousands of work, memories and future income lost.