Will My Book backup files by simply copying & maintainin​g directory structure?

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I’m considering buying a My Book Essential and have some questions.

Status:

  • The My Book will backup files from a single computer (PC) on a small peer-to-peer network.

  • The computer is used to save all the files from the other computers on the network.

  • We call it “the server” even though it is not running any server software.

  • It is simply working as a community hard drive so we have all our files in one place.

My Questions:

1 – Can I set the software to backup by simply copying the files while maintaining the directory structure?

2 – Or does the backup software create a backup file using a proprietary file format?

We like the first because it is easy to retrieve a file from the My Book backup disk via any computer on the peer-to-peer network without them having to have any special software.

Thanks for any help.

2

The WD Shareware structured my C: drive like this:

(Additional Files)*

Pictures

Other

Music

Movies

Mail

Documents

It does this using the file extensions.   .gif  .xls  .doc  etc. etc.

Then it created a G: Drive (My Book) that was similar but Additional Files was added as a Directory. It then started to back up all my files to G: My Book in a  WD_ShareWare Directory.  The WD_ShareWare Directory has a series of Sub Directories like this:

  • 2FC45CE6FC9848AAB3DFD298552CFE25G

  • 7C02D7FF1F9D450CB936FGF7845235089

  • 9686F50A3F784599FBF3FD84EFG13E3089

  • CBA89CADC9875D8989DBABg897456D8

    config

+DF89185D111F56A7B174F66246AD8EF4

It believe that each is equivalent to the structure of Pictures, Other, Music, Movies, Mail and Documents.

From what I can tell the ShareWare backup software takes all you files with a “Picture” extensions from your C: drive and puts them in your orginal C: drive structure under the Directories shown above.  Then files with a “Music” extension, then files with a “Mail” extension and then files with a “Document” extension. Those it can not figure out go into the Additional Files area.

I hope this helps. I don’t understand why it does this. I am considering removing the ShareWare software and reformatting the MY BOOK Disk.  They I can just copy  my C:\ drive to the MY BOOK External Drive.

This is probably what most people want so they can find any files that might get lost by using the C:\ drive structure that they know and understand.

Cheers.