My Book for Mac and Airport Wireless Time Capsule Confusion

[Sanna]

I am not technical at all so need some guidance, please. I connected a new 2TB My Book to my Airport Wireless Time Capsule tonight. I loaded the WD Smartware software. I see the items that have been 'backed up' from my macbook pro as light blue shaded sections. However, I am not able to select "Set Up Drive" from the "Settings" tab as the "set up drive' button is super faded and not clickable. Also, I don't have the WD Smartware icon in the upper right corner that the manual says I should see. Lastly, my main purpose for getting the My Book EHD is to back up my laptop as my Time Capsule has 21 GB remaining and I need another option to back up my computer.

What is wrong and why can't I click on the 'set up drive' and why don't I see the icon on the upper right corner of my screen?

It took my several weeks to get up the courage to connect this thing and now I don't know what to do to set it up for auto back up.

Thanks for anyone's insight and expertise!

[ThePizzaMatrix]

The settings section only works on USB, same as the system tray icon on the upper section.

[Wayne]

also, are you trying to use time machine as well as smartware?  cause you shouldn't.

[edit]

what pizza is saying is that you need to connect the drive directly to the computer you want to back up from in order to use the way you're trying.

[Sanna]

Thank you very much for your guidance. I was under the impression that I could plug the My Book for Mac into the airport wireless time capsule and back up my laptop (MBP) remotely similar to how the Time Capsule worked. Apparently, I was mistaken. I will use it as a basic EHD which isn't what I was hoping to have but it is what it is.

[Wayne]

well, I'm not sure that you can't, but you might have to find out how to access it.  go to apple's knowledge base and see if it shows you how.

[Manuductor]

Wayne,

I have read seveal of your answers and they are very clear to a non-techy guy.  So, here's my problem.  I have a MacBook Pro and a Time Capsule and was backing up wirelessly.  It stopped backing up, so I hardwired the TC to the MBP, but it wouldn't back up because the TC was looking for the network connection.  I have several thousand photos I took in the meantime that are not backed up on an EHD.  So I boughr a WD 3TB My Book Essential and did the formatting for the Mac as instructed, and backed up the entire hd of the MBP to the WD EHD overnight.  It took up almost 400GB, about 300 of which are photos.  In the window that shows the computer on the left with its hd contents and shows the EHD on the right with its contents, they were the same after the back up, so I am happy with that.   All of this took place the night before last and yesterday.  

A few questions, then:  is the system backing up using Time Machine?  How will I know? I formatted using the smartware, as instructed.  If that was a mistake, how do I undo it?

How do I see what is on the EHD by category, i.e., photos, documents, etc?

Does the WD EHD back up automatically or do I have to instruct it to do so each time?  I chose the option, back up when computer is idle.  But does it back up each day, each week, etc?  I never had the option to choose.  Can I assume, then, that the EHD backs up only when there has been some changes on the internal hd, i.e., after I have done some editing work on my photos?

My inernal HD on my MBP has a 500GB capacity; over 400GB of stuff there already, 300GB of which is photos.  I use Adobe Lightroom and want to transfer my photos to the EHD and TC  to free up space on my internal hd.  Do you know how I could do that?  Thanks for any help.

[Wayne]

I'm sorry.  I've been gone for a while.  did you ever get help on that?