Having paid for Smartware Pro for use with an external backup drive, I was hoping it would prove a better backup solution than either the free copy of Smartware that came with the drive or Windows File History (Win.7 and 8). In fact, I have been disappointed because of the inability of Smartware (in either version) to remove unwanted files that have been deleted from the PC - as has been noted by many posters in this forum (I know, you could do so manually but life is too short for that). In turn this means that your backup drive gradually fills up until the only way forward is to delete the entire backup and start over (or re-format).
This is NOT a safe way of operating as you will have no backup at all during the start-over process unless you have a second backup drive going as well, which would require using separate backup software as Smartware would not keep two backups going. This behaviour of Smartware occurs even if the Settings > File History tab is set to keep only 1 copy.
I suggest that Smartware Pro should include a button to purge unwanted older files. This is surely a fairly basic requirement for any backup software?
My question, then, is really one for WD; are there any plans to add this purging facility to Smartware Pro? So many of your customers would welcome it.
By the way, I have heard about WD Anywhere Backup having just this purging facility but, as a cloud-based system this is not open to me; I have over 300GB of data, you can imagine the upload time that would be required at current data rates (several weeks of continuous uploading!).
My own solution has been to have a second external drive and use Windows File History for that one even though there have been reliability issues with this software.
