I bought the 1TB drive. I wanted it to do automatic back-up as well as an extra external hard drive.
It seems to be taking forever to do the initial back-up. I started it yesterday afternoon. It still has about 50G to go and seems to be sitting and no moving files. It says they have been copied on the bar at the top. The lights on the front are blinking very slowly. It’s been sitting at 101,848 files and 97.24G for the past hour. There are still about 10,000 files to copy. Is it still working?
Can I use it as a regular hard drive and a back-up drive at the same time? If so how do I do that? I just want to save files to the drive to be retrieve at will as full uncompressed files I want to store my photos there rather than on my internal hard drive. Then when I want to look at them or PhotoShop them just access them from My Book. (My internal hard drive is running out of room)
I have 100+G of music for my iTunes. Can I store them on the My Book and have that program access them from there? Do I need to make a separate copy of them on the drive outside of the backup copy of my internal hard drive?
If I decide to delete my music files from my internal hard drive (after doing the initial full back-up). Will they then get deleted fro the My Book too? I only have 8 G of space left on my internal hard drive and when I run PhotoShop the machine chokes.
'"I bought the 1TB drive. I wanted it to do automatic back-up as well as an extra external hard drive.
It seems to be taking forever to do the initial back-up. I started it yesterday afternoon. It still has about 50G to go and seems to be sitting and no moving files. It says they have been copied on the bar at the top. The lights on the front are blinking very slowly. It’s been sitting at 101,848 files and 97.24G for the past hour. There are still about 10,000 files to copy. Is it still working?
Can I use it as a regular hard drive and a back-up drive at the same time? If so how do I do that? I just want to save files to the drive to be retrieve at will as full uncompressed files I want to store my photos there rather than on my internal hard drive. Then when I want to look at them or PhotoShop them just access them from My Book. (My internal hard drive is running out of room)
I have 100+G of music for my iTunes. Can I store them on the My Book and have that program access them from there? Do I need to make a separate copy of them on the drive outside of the backup copy of my internal hard drive?
If I decide to delete my music files from my internal hard drive (after doing the initial full back-up). Will they then get deleted fro the My Book too? I only have 8 G of space left on my internal hard drive and when I run PhotoShop the machine chokes.
Thanks in advance for the help.“”
I’m new to the MyBooks as well, but I’ve been working with computers for 10 years…
This is because it’s using USB 2.0 and can only do 480Mb per second and it sounds like you have around 150Gb of data to back up - it’s it’s going to take a while. But, if you’re using an older computer (or just an older motherboard), you might be using USB 1.1 which runs at around 12Mb per second - taking almost 40 times longer to back up.
I’m backing up close to 750Gb, and I had to leave mine on over night (using USB 2.0), it’s still far from completion.
To use you MyBook as an external hard drive, all you would need to do is got to “My Computer”, click on what ever drive letter windows assigned to your MyBook (if you only have 1 internal hard drive, then that letter is almost certainly D:/), and just cut/copy and paste the files from the location on your internal drive onto you MyBook drive **OUTSIDE** the “WD SmartWare.swstor” folder. You can then access these file and folder by clicking on your MyBook drive from My Computer - or if you’re using Windows 7 as your operating system, Windows 7 will scan it automatically and add it to you searches when you click on the windows icon in the lower left hand corner of your desktop and input a search term.
Easily. just move your music to your MyBook, outside the “WD SmartWare.swstor” folder, and then go into you iTunes settings, (at this point I’m generalizing, it’s been a while since I’ve used iTunes and never got around to reinstalling it after upgrading to Windows 7) select media folder options, add folder, select the drive letter windows assigned to your MyBook, and select the folder that all your music is in, outside of your “WD SmartWare.swstor” folder. the one risk with this is that is going to use *a lot* of space on your MyBook. You say you have 100+Gb of music, well when you put it on there, that’ll take up 100+Gb of room, and if you chose to have the SmartWare also back up the files out side of your “WD SmartWare.swstor” folder (which I see no reason why you couldn’t), then that’ll take up *another* 100+Gb of space on your MyBook. Now, depending on your MyBook size, this might not be too big of an issue. it sounds liek you only have 150Gb of files and the drive on your computer is mostly full, so if you bought a 500Gb, 750Gb, 1Tb, 1.5Tb or even the 2Tb version of the Mybook, you should have plenty of room to do this (though the 500Gb on will start to get a cramped afterwards, leaving with only about 150-200Gb of room).
While I cannot be sure, most drive companies wouldn’t write their backup software to delete a file on your back up drive if it’s deleted on your main machine. What may happen though, is the SmartWare may take over, assuming data loss, and immediately begin restoring the files you just replaced. Or nothing might happen.
Do you have a solution for a computer that does not give the WD drive a letter designation? The WD just does not show up in My Computer at all. Thanks for your help.
Right Click In the Icon of My Computer / Computer > Manage > Disk management and At the Bottom It will Show You
the WD Drive Without a Drive Letter , you just Need to do Another right Click in the WD Drive and Will Have an option that Says ‘’ Change Drive letter and Path ‘’ go ahead and Click in ‘‘ADD’’ and > ok And your HD Will be Recognized under my Computer
Should you Have Any Question? Just let Me Know!
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You need to have more than one copy of your files saved. I would look at something more reliable than Smartware it’s buggy. Look at the posts here where people have relied on one external drive to store files and lost them all with some problem. Updating firmware has caused it’s share of corrupted data on these drives too.
Okay. I got as far as opening Computer Management and finding Disk Management. On the right hand side of that window, there is an upper portion and a lower portion. In the upper portion, I see two drives listed: my usual C drive and another that has no letter designation. I can tell from the size that the second is my WD drive. Under Status for the WD drive, I see “Healthy (GPT Protective Partition)”. When I right click on the drive icon for the WD drive, I get a menu, but the option I want, “Change Drive Letter and Paths”, is grayed out.
In the lower window, the WD drive is designated as “Disk 5”. If I right click on the drive icon in the smaller section where the “Disk 5” label is, I get a totally different menu. If I right click on the right-hand, larger section, I get the same menu as above, again with the option I want grayed out.
I should note that the only option NOT grayed out in that menu is “Help”.
I also note that, in the upper window, no information is listed for the WD drive under “File System”. Do I perhaps need to format the WD drive before I can give it a letter? Unfortunately, “Format” is one of the options in the menu that is grayed out.
Gabthemonster, thanks for your help so far; I appreciate the clarity of your response more than you can imagine.
