Software tool incompatibilities and confusion

[BJN]

I am trying to make sense of the different WD software tools and it’s very frustrating. I own 2 WD Elements and 2 WD My Book USB drives (1 quite old and 1 new) as well as 1 WD My Cloud network drive. There is no single utility and backup program that supports all of them. I have been using WD Smartware Pro, which I payed for, to do my backups. Works fine. It recognizes the Elements, the My Cloud and the old My Book. One of the My Books is acting flaky and WD tech support advises me that it may have a hardware problem. So I have retired it and bought my 2nd My Book. WD Smartware recognized the old My Book but it does not recognize the new one. For the new one I need to use WD Backup. However that recognizes only the new My Book but not the Elements or the My Cloud. Why is this? Why can’t one backup program recognize all drive types? Why do I need to have 2 different backup programs? I used Smartware Pro also to configure sleep timers on my drives. Worked fine for the old My Book but it does not recognize the new My Book. So for that I need to use WD Drive utilities, which recognizes only the new My Book. I don’t get it! To make things worse the new My Book never goes into sleep mode. I have checked as best as I can that there are no apps accessing the drive but it never goes to sleep. The Elements does just fine. Can someone from WD please help make sense of all this? Thanks.