Hard Drive Help

[DennisM]

I currently have two external hard drives, a WD My Book and a WD Ultra both purchased several years ago; computer environment is a 2016 Dell XPS tower, i7 chip, Windows 10, McAfee anti-virus, and Firefox. My issue is that the My Book fails to backup regularly, most recently it backs up every other day; today was the first time that it failed to backup three days in a row. However, the Ultra drove backups like clockwork. Ultra uses "WD Smartware," and My Book uses "WD Backup." Backups are scheduled daily in the 2:00 to 4:00 AM window; Ultra backups scheduled two hours earlier than My Book. Sleep timer settings the same for both drives, and WD Drive Utilities "Status check" shows that there are no issues with either drive. WD tech support is useless; their approach is: "try this, see if it works." Then, "OK, let's try this." They've advised that I should disconnect the drive when not in use, which seems ridiculous to me. Their latest advice is to disable power management settings in Windows, which I haven't done (yet?). I'm at the point where I'm ready to cease dialogue with WD and scrap the My Book drive and replace it with something else. I don't want to provide WD personnel with remote access to my system since, frankly I don't trust them. Has anyone had a similar experience? and if so what remedies or solutions have you found?

 

[Ko.Fe.]

If I have hardware issue, I'm looking to logs. Find where logs are and read them.

Also, not providing assess to support is kind of not smart, to be honest.
I work in the broadcast industry and for decade or so we are using remote access to stations with multi-million dollars equipment, revenues. We are using same applications anyone else is using. Remote desktop, TeamViewer to Windows based computers on another site.

The only times we could not have assess is something like NASA and other military institutions. Are you kapral? 🙂

 

[Dan Daniel]

The My Book drive I have power downs when idle and takes forever to power back up. Maybe your backup program is looking for the drive and either can't see it because it is powered down, or it takes too long for the drive to come back online and the BU program has timed out?

I noticed how bad the My Book drive was on powering up when I moved my main photo working drive to it. Going to access a file would take forever (well, 30 seconds or more?) while the computer tried to wake the drive and wait for it to come online. I researched changing the sleep/power cycle of hte My Book and the basic consensus was that this is built it to its firmware and can't be changed.

Make certain you have accessed the drive for maybe an hour or more, then try to run the backup program. See if it times out trying to wake up the drive?

I use Syncback for backups. It does a prolonged attempt to find a drive. I never have had problems with Syncback doing auto backups to the My Drive. Maybe its wake up time is long enough for the My Book to come online, while your program gives up before the My Book wakes up?

 

[willie_901]

After "several years"it's time for new drives anyway. They don't last forever. I replace may backup drives even 2-3 years.

The old units become archives. You can use the old archive drives for off-site storage/recovery. I keep mine at a relatives home. But you have to remember to update them every so often.

I use OS X and am unable to provide advice for Windows 10 back up solutions.

 

[Bill Clark]

I never did use auto backup. Not available when I began using digital.

Hate to write this but never had a problem, with any hard drive, internal or external. My stuff lasts and lasts. I have an iMac from 2006 still with the original clock battery. Before Apple, I have an IBM PC so old it has Windows 95 installed. Used it for my business accounting, database. I started with a dot matrix printer! Bang bang!

Now I use only Apple products, except external hd use various.

Always kept my cf cards, kind of a last resort just in case, and only would format only at the beginning of each new gig.

Always captured using raw format. All Canon cameras. Backup raw files, two versions, one originals, the other corrected. Tho I suppose I didn’t need to do that as I could erase the sidecar file. Tried Adobes dng saw no advantage quit using it. Backed up jpegs.

Quit updating Photoshop with CS-4 my last version. It did what I wanted it to do.

Didn’t use computer internal hard drive for camera files. Always externals. Boy, did the cost go down with capacity going up and up. I think my largest external is a couple of terrabytes.

Kept it simple. Maybe that’s why my stuff lasts so long, doesn’t break down. No auto anything.

Happy I’m no longer in the wedding business. Big loss of income in 2020 with this virus crap.

Hope some of my brief business philosophy I explained here rubs off and helps you.