I had an amazingly unproductive day on Saturday. The major crisis, among the other minor crisis’, was my complete ineptitude with computers. I had purchased a new external drive for my Apple MacBook because the internal drive was 98% full and I convinced myself that it would be easy to free up some space by transferring files from the internal drive to the new external drive. 160GB is not a very big drive any more with movies, pictures, and audio book files as large as they are.
My day began by plugging in the wonderfully small hard drive into the USB port of the MacBook and having everything work. It was a great feeling, I was half way done! I selected one of the MacBook folders(50GB) and happily transferred the files to the external drive and then blithely deleted the original files. I was a computer guru! I now had more space on my internal drive.
Problems started popping up almost immediately. My I-Tunes was not working the same. My I-pod was not syncing properly. All my books, movies, TV shows, etc had disappeared. Oh, what had I done! I dropped everything and trudged outside to cut the lawn in the rain. We live in western Washington and we pay a price for the green surroundings. If we don’t cut wet grass sometimes, we just don’t cut the grass and it gets a foot high before it dries out. As I struggled with the soggy grass balls bogging down the lawnmower, my feverous brain struggled with the solution to my ineptitude. If only I had backed up the hard drive before deleting the files! After all, isn’t that what a external “backup” drive is for? I finally decided to copy the files back to the internal drive, but I couldn’t remember the name of the folder I had copied. Again, I wondered, “What is the proper use for a backup drive and why had I not done it correctly!”
After finishing with the soggy lawn and dragging the grass clogged mower into the shed (wet, moldy grass really stinks), I announced to my wife that we had a computer emergency and she was not to bother me as I performed computer surgery. The files were copied back to a folder I thought was correct and miraculously the laptop and I-Tunes started behaving. I was once again a computer guru, but sadly no further ahead that I was at the beginning of the day. Now I was getting serious, I will back up the hard drive onto my fancy new drive and everything will be grand. The program that came with the WD hard drive was loaded into the laptop, installed and functioning, …until I tried to use it. After selecting the files to back up, I suddenly had 400GB of back files from an internal 160GB hard drive to back up onto my external 320GB drive. Something was not right! To top it all off, the new back up program would not quit and would not let me turn off my laptop. The “WD Anywhere Backup” program intercepted the laptop shutdown sequence and refused to let it happen. My pure, sweet, innocent Apple laptop will never, ever shut down again! What had I done!
Time to call my friendly customer support in… India? No problem, they have smart people in India. All I needed to do was read the serial number off the hard drive to verify to the customer support staff, in India, that I had a real, genuine WD drive in my hand. I am fifty three years old and wear reading glasses, but my eye site has always been good. I could not read the quarter inch high label on the 3”x5” hard dr
ive case, even with a magnifying glass. No combination of numbers, real or imaginary would convince my friend from India that I had a real live WD hard drive in my hand. Was that a 6 or an 8, was that an S or a 5?
Now that I had a method of escape from the control freak of a back up program, I installed
To conclude this saga, I will never, ever use the “WD Anywhere Backup” program again, and my laptop is still acting OK. Does anyone know of a good, cheap backup program?
My day began by plugging in the wonderfully small hard drive into the USB port of the MacBook and having everything work. It was a great feeling, I was half way done! I selected one of the MacBook folders(50GB) and happily transferred the files to the external drive and then blithely deleted the original files. I was a computer guru! I now had more space on my internal drive.
Problems started popping up almost immediately. My I-Tunes was not working the same. My I-pod was not syncing properly. All my books, movies, TV shows, etc had disappeared. Oh, what had I done! I dropped everything and trudged outside to cut the lawn in the rain. We live in western Washington and we pay a price for the green surroundings. If we don’t cut wet grass sometimes, we just don’t cut the grass and it gets a foot high before it dries out. As I struggled with the soggy grass balls bogging down the lawnmower, my feverous brain struggled with the solution to my ineptitude. If only I had backed up the hard drive before deleting the files! After all, isn’t that what a external “backup” drive is for? I finally decided to copy the files back to the internal drive, but I couldn’t remember the name of the folder I had copied. Again, I wondered, “What is the proper use for a backup drive and why had I not done it correctly!”
After finishing with the soggy lawn and dragging the grass clogged mower into the shed (wet, moldy grass really stinks), I announced to my wife that we had a computer emergency and she was not to bother me as I performed computer surgery. The files were copied back to a folder I thought was correct and miraculously the laptop and I-Tunes started behaving. I was once again a computer guru, but sadly no further ahead that I was at the beginning of the day. Now I was getting serious, I will back up the hard drive onto my fancy new drive and everything will be grand. The program that came with the WD hard drive was loaded into the laptop, installed and functioning, …until I tried to use it. After selecting the files to back up, I suddenly had 400GB of back files from an internal 160GB hard drive to back up onto my external 320GB drive. Something was not right! To top it all off, the new back up program would not quit and would not let me turn off my laptop. The “WD Anywhere Backup” program intercepted the laptop shutdown sequence and refused to let it happen. My pure, sweet, innocent Apple laptop will never, ever shut down again! What had I done!
Time to call my friendly customer support in… India? No problem, they have smart people in India. All I needed to do was read the serial number off the hard drive to verify to the customer support staff, in India, that I had a real, genuine WD drive in my hand. I am fifty three years old and wear reading glasses, but my eye site has always been good. I could not read the quarter inch high label on the 3”x5” hard dr
ive case, even with a magnifying glass. No combination of numbers, real or imaginary would convince my friend from India that I had a real live WD hard drive in my hand. Was that a 6 or an 8, was that an S or a 5? What was I calling him for if I didn’t
have one of his hard drives? My friend tried to help me but I think I was beyond help. During one of the “on hold” sessions, where I think he was questioning the sanity of all Americans who were born in Canada, I uninstalled the WD program, regained control of the laptop, and then told my friend I was going to hang up because I could not stand the WD support system any more.
Now that I had a method of escape from the control freak of a back up program, I installed
and uninstalled the program several times until I thought I had it figured out. Now to finally back up my hard drive. I selected 40GB of the most important files and hit the back up button. The back up program took a few hours to configure the files, but I could live with that. When I came back in from the woodshop, I thought I was finally done, until I looked at the screen and stared in wonder at the time remaining to complete the back up process. The WD back up program had finished configuring the files and now was in the process of 146 hours of backing up the files. What had I done, again? The backup program had no stop button and I could not shut the laptop down(refer to the previous problems), I thought I would never have laptop control again. The guru in me finally pulled out the “final solution” and I uninstalled the backup program, and once again, I was in control!
To conclude this saga, I will never, ever use the “WD Anywhere Backup” program again, and my laptop is still acting OK. Does anyone know of a good, cheap backup program?
