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Problems with 1TB Western Digital Hard Drive

1K views 3 replies 2 participants last post by  JMPC 
#1 ·
Hello:

I have a 1 TB Western Digital Hard Drive - My Book Office Edition. I have the WD Anywhere Backup software installed that automatically keeps your files backed up to the external hard drive. My problem is that after I owned the hard drive for for about a year and it had been regularly backing up my C drive, I noticed that when I went into the external hard drive all of the files were duplicated at least once or twice.

It seems like the original file is backed up and named like it is on my C drive and then all the duplicate files have the original name with a string of numbers/info appended to the end of the name. The duplicate files are exactly the same as the original but instead of having my hard drive backed up once, it is twice or 3 times the size! See the attached image I uploaded to show you how the folders look inside my hard drive.

In my spare time, I decided to try to delete some of these files that are duplicated and that lasted for about a week. I probably had wasted over 20 hours and hardly gotten anywhere. Every single folder is like this and my hard drive in my computer probably has over 300 GB++ of info on it. There is no way I am going to be able to delete all of this or fix it by hand. It would take me forever. I blocked the WD Anywhere Backup software from operating or backing up any more files but now my files haven't been backed up in quite a while so that's not good either.

I'm getting ready to do a system recovery and restore my computer in the next couple weeks but I need to fix this issue with my hard drive first, otherwise I am going to copy all those duplicates back onto the computer after I restore.
Does anybody know how to fix this? Is this something in the settings that got changed that I didn't realize? I tried calling Western Digital but they wanted $40 just to talk to me and I think that would only last for 2 months of support over the phone. I'm a college student and will not be graduating until June and cannot afford to pay that at the moment. Lots of other bills mounting up from going to school. :hide: If anybody knows an easy way to fix this or keep it from happening again, I would really appreciate the help and thank you in advance.

Jeff

I uploaded a screenshot to show you exactly what it looks like in all of the hard drive folders. What a mess:



 
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#2 ·
Assuming there's nothing on the external drive that isn't on the system drive(s), I would just start over with a different backup application. It looks like what they do is keep multiple copies of the same drive and append the backup date to the file.

Are you doing full backups each time or one full and then incremental or differential after that?

There may be something in the configuration that allows you to change how it's doing the backups but it would take a little digging to find the settings.
 
#3 ·
Hello JMPC:

Thank you for your reply. Western Digital supplied Anywhere Backup software with the hard drive and it automatically backs up the folders that you check when you first set it up. After it backs up your computer, anytime you modify or change a file, it also saves the change in that file on your computer and is not supposed to create a duplicate.

I'm going to keep digging to see what I can find on this issue but it is not looking good is it? :lol:

Jeff
 
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