My Book Essential 2 TB

[sac.d]

1) I have a brand new My Book Essential 2 TB USB 3.0 drive, and have not yet installed the softwares (backup, etc) that come with it. If I install the softwares once, and then format my computer's internal drives, then will the backup software run again? Can it be reinstalled once again from the same application files given in the My Book? Will that alter anything already stored in the My Book?

2) A strange thing happened and I don't know if it has something to do with connecting the My Book, but I would be grateful if someone can guide me. A moment after I plugged in the new 2 TB drive, I played a YouTube video on full screen mode and the computer hanged. This is now happening repeatedly. Does this have something to do with the new 2 TB drive? My computer is old, with Windows XP, a Core 2 Duo processor, 3 GB RAM, a new ASUS EN210 Silent 512M DDR2 graphics card, and an old motherboard MSI P965Neo. 

Thanks in advance.

[Alucardx23 · Accepted solution]

You can always reinstall Smartware on any computer and recover your backup. The external hard drive should not affect in any way the youtube videos, but you can always try to remove it and try again. 

[sac.d]

Thank you so much.

May I ask a few more questions:

1. Is there any way to disenable the automatic backup software when I want to? I want it to keep a backup of certain files, but I don't want it to keep backing the original files continuosly. I may make some changes to the originals and do not want those changes to reflect in the backups in the new WD. Those changes could also mean that I delete the original files from the computer. Does that mean that they get changed or deleted from the WD back up drive as well? Are there any settings which let me decide whether I want to backup certain files upto a point and not any further, ie, is there any way the backup isn't *automatic* but depends on my discretion? Or is the best way to do this to simply remove the backup files from WD and then manually copy files into it from the main computer?

2. My computer is running on Windows XP and I am planning to format it sometime in the future and install Windows 7. What happens to the already backed up files in this case? Also since I've installed the WD automatic backup software with Windows XP, what happens to the software and the WD drive? Will it adapt itself and work as usual? Or what changes will I have to make later?

Thanks for taking the trouble to help.

[sac.d]

Another question, if you don't mind:

3. Say, I separately copy some new files to my WD, and which are not backup files - what happens to them if I later uninstall the backup software? I understand that the backed up files will be lost from the WD if I uninstall the software, but what about the files which are separately copied and pasted in another folder in the WD? Will they be lost too?