I have been running backups once a month from my Win 7 PC to a My Cloud drive using WD Smartware. The PC was destroyed last week, I have a new PC and am trying to retrieve the backup. It appears that the most recent backup is incomplete as the My Cloud drive ran out of space. In looking at the backup files, the folder with the second most recent backup appears to be three times the size of the most recent one so I suspect it’s complete.
I cannot find any mean to tell Smartware to retrieve from the older backup rather than the most recent. Can anyone clue me in as to what to do ??
If one has used WD Sync one may also be able to recover certain files synced to the My Cloud as well. See the WD Sync Help for more information on restoring deleted files.
These are the same instructions that are part of the Smartware software.
When I attempt to retrieve, NOWHERE does it show that there are multiple
backups and allow me to select which backup to retrieve from. When I
look directly at the My Cloud drive, there are 5 unique backup folders
with different dates. Each folder contains from 150 to 500 196 MB zip
files. I can open the individual zip files and extract individual files
but how can I just tell Smartware to look at that specific folder and
retrieve all of the contents automatically??
See page 67, Specifying the Number of Backup Versions in the Smartware User Manual which explains how to specify the number of backup versions of each file the software should keep. From page 67…
“The WD SmartWare software can keep up to 25 older versions of each file. If you overwrite or delete a file by mistake, or want to see the file a couple of versions ago, the WD SmartWare software has a copy for you. You always have the most-recent specified number of versions of each file available for retrieves, and you can choose to keep from 1 to 25 versions.”
Obviously if the number of backups is set to 1 then you won’t be able to restore earlier versions of the backed up file(s). I don’t recall offhand what the default backup setting is for Smartware as I no longer use it, rather I use a third party backup program (with more features) instead.
The default was 1 which I changed to 5. I can clearly see 5 unique backups
on the drive but nowhere can I find where to select which backup version to
retreive. Should I move the more recent one off of the drive and maybe
force it to look at the older one?
See Chapter 6, Retrieving Files, in the Smartware User Manual for more information on how to retrieve files. In particular they show on page 52 how one would select “Retrieve Some Files” then select “Show older files” which should show the additional older backed up file(s). Or one can select “Show deleted files” which should show any file(s) that have been deleted.
