Useless as a backup device?

I bought a 1T My Book Elite for the sole purpose of doing backups.  With administrator access, I expected to be able to backup anything the admin account had access to. After doing the install and initial 3 hour backup, I went to the Retrieval tab to test a recovery.  I quickly realized that SmartWare hadn’t backed up any mail files and had skipped 90% of all documents.  And not just for the other accounts on the machine (as noted in another thread), but all accounts, even for the Admin account I’d executed the initial backup from.

I started looking through the WD Knowledge Base and discovered that while SmartWare will backup various mail formats, including Outlook’s pst, it specifically excludes backups from the AppData\Local folder hierarchy where Outlook puts the pst files.  Even worse, SmartWare also appears to specifically exclude performing any backups on the My Documents (XP) and Documents (Vista) folder hierarchies for all users.

Can someone please tell me how it’s useful to support the backup of almost 200 file types but exclude the folder hierarchies where a good number of those files are stored?  Apparently, for me, the only thing SmartWare will backup is the Public folder (which only contains 10% of my files).

Is anyone using one of these things for backups?  How are you doing it? Unless I’ve done something wrong, I have absolutely no use for this thing.

You might just want to use more robust backup software and disable the VCD entirely.

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/updates/?family=wdsmartwareutilities

I wouldn’t say useless, but, can someone explain why, in c:\ there are more users than the MyBook will include in backup? It excludes the Guest and another Admin account I have set up. Why does it do this?

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I submitted an email request to WD Support and got the following response:

SmartWare does not back up all of the files on your C: drive (or any other drive). What it does do is scan for specific file extensions in specific file categories and keep those files backed up. A list of supported and non-supported file types is available in the knowledge base article below.
In addition, SmartWare only backs up your own user files. To back up others’ files it must be running while they are logged in, too.

This did explain one of my problems and I found that when I was logged in as the other user I wanted backed up it did back it up and all users are shown.

Jerry