hi all-
I have WD Backup running on a Win7 PC backing up to a MyPassport Ultra USB disk, this is copying disk images and documents from a LAN share. I’ve upgraded the WD Backup software twice in the last month, and I’ve noticed an issue occurring - the 3Tb USB disk is filling up rapidly; despite the total backup only being about 800Gb, 2.3Tb is already used. When I look at the contents of the USB disk, I see a path:
[disk]\WD Backup.swstor\[user]\[UUID]\
\History\[VolumeID] contains copies of the selected backup folders, but there is also just
\[VolumeID] which contains another copy of the same folders. Can someone please give some details on the storage structure in use here, and how I can edit/reduce the retention? I expect one is the current backup, the other is previous revisions, or has this changed and gigabytes of files been orphaned with the version upgrades? In the Restore function, the software seems to be indicating I have 28 restore points available; I don’t need or want 28 revisions of the files, I just need the most current, or maybe a fixed number of restore points - you know, like a real backup program.
A) How can I manually reduce the total volume of data stored? There seems to be no function to DELETE backups, or even remove specific restore points. Is the software performing any compression or deduplication? It certainly doesn’t look like it. Do I have to format the disk and restart a full backup from scratch to recover space?
B) How can I still force an hourly or daily sync, without retaining EVERY sync since the beginning of time? There’s no explicit rotation schedule either. Is the software keeping 30 days of data? 30 restores? Or will it just keep writing until the disk fills up and (Murphy’s law) a crucial backup fails? There’s no information or function in the software to indicate that. I’ve read the help file with the software and there’s literally no information whatsoever about how it backs up, or how much it retains. There’s also (again, let me emphasize) no method to explicitly delete or prune the stored content, and yet the software seems to explicitly keep multiple restore points.
I understand this is free software bundled with a HDD, but its functionality seems to be deliberately designed to use up as much space as possible. A hard drive manufacturer trying to make you use up more of their product? Inconthevable.
