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Bruce CorsonFlag for United States of America

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WD Smartware Backup & Windows 7 Backup

I had a few minutes with an attorney's WD drive connected to his laptop. I'm going to have some time with him to fix a backup issue over the weekend. Here's what I saw in the few minutes I had access:

He is prompted to run unlock.exe then the backup starts, using the built-in Smartware backup. As it produces errors ("system backed up but with some errors" that you can't find), I told him I thought we should just use Windows 7 built-in backup functionality. When I went to demonstrate that, I saw that Windows was in the process of backing up, to a drive I hadn't seen to that point, a G drive, labeled My Passport.

So, my presumption is that Smartware actually takes over the Win7 backup process. But, client doesn't understand it (nor do I apparently) and cannot confirm that everything is being backed up.

I'm set to recommend that we wipe the external drive clean and use Windows 7 backup function to carry on.

Comments? Educate me? Thank you.

PS I'm aware that WD drives generally are not reliable, and I'm going to recommend we get him a different drive.
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Nick Rhode
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Thank you. I'm using the Win 7 backup tool directly now. But as often, or always, happens, Win 7 notifies me that some files were skipped. Why doesn't Windows 7 just back up what it finds??