Question about how passport works with deleting or changing files?

Software WD Discovery
1

Hi, newbie here,

I was just wondering what happens if you delete a file on the pc that the passport is used to back up. Some people says that it is not deleted on the passport and some people make it seem like it is based on the number of backup versions to keep for each file so I was wondering if someone could explain it to me exactly? If it is based on the number of backup versions, does that mean that as I use the passport more often the file will eventually disappear if it is not on my pc?

Is it possible to stop that?

And if the files are changed, how does the passport keep track of those? If multiple copies of the file are kept each with some difference, how would I be able to access them? Because when I look in the swstor folder, I can only see one copy of files I know have changed and my backup versions number is ten…

Thank you for clarifying!

2

Presuming that you’re talking about Smartware, and just using the My Passport as the back-up media…

Smartware will not delete any files on the back-up media. It’s back-up software, not sync software. If you delete it from the source (ie your computer that you’re backing up), it’ll still stay on the MP forever, or at least until you manually go in and delete it from the swstor folder. That’s at least in part rather the point of the whole process, so that you can recover files that you’ve lost, either accidentally (deleted by mistake for example) or via some issue with the source computer.

As to seeing the different versions of the file, they are accessed via the restore tab in Smartware if I remember correctly (although I must admit I’ve never actually tried it personally). See the bottom of page 52 in the manual (step 6 in the restore procedure).