WD External Hard Drive Automatic Backup Guide | Download

WD external hard drive automatic backup

WD is short for Western Digital and one of the largest computer hard disk drive manufacturers in the world. WD external hard drives are widely used on many popular computers to store important data, such as HP and Acer... and mainly includes WD Elements Portable and My Passport Ultra.

You may know manually backup system or files on WD external hard drive only includes the items when you back it up, not changes made later. If your computer runs into issues after a long time, you will lose data between this period. Thus, you need to perform WD external hard drive automatic backup for continuous data protection.

The best WD auto backup software

Western Digital has released a data backup software known as WD Smartware. It can be set to run an automatic backup for files but not for programs or Windows operating system, and you should prepare for a bad situation that files pending backup.

Other limitations are still out there, for example, it doesn’t support Windows 10, files in use cannot be backed up, and large files consume massive CPU resources to make your computer very slow. Last but not least, the support for WD Smartware has ended and is no longer covered under WD‘s software support lifecycle.

Therefore, we recommend you a real WD auto backup software - AOMEI Backupper. Below are some useful features of AOMEI Backupper you can enjoy:

✍Auto backup file, system, disk and partition: It supports backing up them in daily, weekly, monthly. And you can set backup date, time, intervals.

✍Incremental backup: It backs up only changed files, which greatly reduces backup image size and disk space you will use. And it is usually used with schedule backup option.

✍Multiple backup devices supported: It supports backup to internal/external hard drive, SSD, USB, DVD/CD, NAS, etc of all brands.

In addition, it is compatible with all editions Windows systems (Windows 11/10/8/7/XP/Vista) and anyone can achieve tasks easily due to its intuitive interface. Next, we’d like to show you how to do Western Digital external hard drive automatic backup with it.

How to do WD external hard drive automatic backup

Suppose that you want to automatically backup your Windows operating system to a WD external hard drive in case of disk broken or system crash, in this way, you will always bring your computer back with a system backup on WD external hard drive and keep the latest change.

Step 1. Download and install WD auto backup software.

For personal users, just install AOMEI Backupper Standard. For server users, try AOMEI Backupper Server.

Step 2. Choose the backup type.

Launch AOMEI Backupper, and choose “System Backup” under “Backup” tab. You can also choose "Disk Backup" or "File Backup" according to the type of data you want to backup.

Step 3. Specify the backup destination.

The system-related partitions will be selected automatically when you click system backup in previous step. Then, click where the arrow point and choose WD external hard drive as destination location.

Tip: WD external hard drive should be connected to your computer if you don't connect it.

Step 4. Set up the schedule for automatica backup.

Click “Schedule Backup” to set WD external hard drive automatic backup. In pop-up window, you can set to run the backup daily/week/monthly at an exact time. Also, you can try Event-trigger and USB plug in.

Step 5. Complete the setup and execute the backup.

Click “Start Backup” to execute WD automatic backup operation.

By default, it will create one full backup and 6 incremental backups if you set a scheduled task. This makes up a cycle and the backup disk will be fulfilled sooner or later if you don't delete old backups. Try automatic backup cleanup methods in the Backup Scheme. You need to upgrade if you want to use it!

Summary

WD external hard drive automatic backup is a good choice to protect your data well, and free AOMEI Backupper as a professional WD auto backup software is a big help. It allows you to backup system, disk, partition or files to WD external drive automatically, ranging from daily to monthly. It backs up only changes by default, so you don't need to worry about backup disk full too much.

Consider you create a scheduled backup and backup disk space is limited, thus it's still suggested to delete old backups automatically using automatic backup cleanup methods. Manually deleting backup files may result in all the subsequent backups being invalid if it's one of the middle backup. You can also try a differential backup to avoid this issue. They are premium features on the advanced version. Please check the edition comparison page.