Review on 💾 Efficient Data Storage: Western Digital 8TB EASYSTORE External HDD (WDBCKA0080HBK-NESN) by John Hattalli

This Western Digital EasyStore external hard drive is a single-task dedicated computing device; Automatic and transparent backup of one or more drives (Solid State Drives and/or Hard Disks) on a given computer. This model is one of the desktop computer models (WD also makes a line of EasyStore portable products) designed to be placed on the desktop. right next to your desktop or tower computer. This is a small tower/tower case that's about the same size as a typical cable modem and contains a Western Digital hard disk drive (HDD) and power supply (although it still has an external "wall wart" style power supply needed). It comes with a power adapter and a short USB Type 2 cable, maybe a few feet long. It also comes with several WD software applications zipped into a single file preinstalled on the internal drive. There are two versions of the software; for Windows and Mac systems. The internal hard drive is preformatted for use with Windows computers. If you want to use it on a Mac computer, you need to reformat your hard drive before using it. To use this product, place it on a surface near your computer, connect an AC adapter, and connect this device to any USB port on your computer with a USB cable. no power switch; it turns on when plugged in. In Windows, the internal hard drive is immediately recognized as a storage device and appears in File Explorer (Windows Explorer) and is available as a drive for any Windows application and you can use it like any USB hard drive or a large "flash" drive ".storage device". However, the product is primarily designed for automated scheduled backups. To do this, you need to run the .exe file that comes pre-installed on your internal hard drive, which will install the Discovery application on your computer. I believe the function of this program is to constantly scan your hard drive (or all drives) and then create and manage an index file that resides on your internal hard drive. Then you can install a few more applications from Discovery; WD Backup and WD Utilities. The backup application allows you to schedule how automatic backups work; how often, when and which drives should be backed up. Utilities offer several maintenance features that you will probably never need. Working with backups is easy. You can first choose which of the two locations you want to back up, and that can be either the EasyStore hard drive or your DropBox account's "cloud" storage (if you have one). If you selected EasyStore (assuming you selected that option), you will be presented with a list of hard drives on your computer that are available for backup. You choose one or more of them. You will then be asked three questions about when and how often to run automatic backups. You can also press the on-screen button to trigger an instant unscheduled backup. For example, you can choose to backup every day at 2am, or once every Saturday at 10pm, etc. EasyStore will start looking for your drives and building its database right away, but it doesn't necessarily start. Copy files before the first scheduled time. At first glance, it might seem like there was no backup, as EasyStore hides all backed up (copied) files in about five levels of folders on the internal hard drive. But once you know where to look, it's easy to view all of the backup files. The backup is automatic and transparent. Even when you're at your computer, you probably won't notice the EasyStore Backup app and hard drive quietly going about their business in the background. There is no status other than a mysterious LED on the front of the EasyStore. However, the backup application displays the date and time of the last backup. After initially copying all files into EasyStore, subsequent backups contain only those files that have been added or changed since the last backup. Because of this, most scheduled backups don't last long. The backup application will NOT delete or rename any files on the EasyStore drive. If you've renamed a file on your computer's drive, Backup seems to treat it as a new file and copy it without deleting the old file. And if you delete a file on your computer's drive, Backup doesn't seem to delete the EasyStore backup. Also, Backup does not make any changes to the drives on your computer; this affects the EasyStore drive only. I've had several of these drives for different computers and so far they've all worked perfectly. Customer service/tech support is pretty easy to reach when you need it, although they don't work 24/7. I like this product as a way to inexpensively backup my computer without the security issues associated with using cloud backup schemes.