The scenario
There was a user asked for help: I have bought a new laptop installed with Windows 10, my old PC is dead. Now, I have a WD Elements hard drive with some important files, and I want to backup files on it automatically. However, I don’t know how to do it and can’t find a solution, please help.
Western Digital (WD) hard drives
Western Digital is one of the most popular hard drive manufacturers, and produces hard drives (includes HDDs and SSDs) for laptop and desktop PCs to save data. These hard drives or external hard drives contain My Passport, My Book, WD TV, My Cloud, Elements, ShareSpace, etc. In order to backup your Western Digital Elements hard drive, we will walk you through the solutions to help you out.
WD Backup Software
As far as I know, the Western Digital offers different series of hard drive with different backup software comes with the drive.
For My Cloud drives, the WD SmartWare backup software is available.
For My Book or My Passport drives, the WD Anywhere, WD SmartWare backup software or the third party backup tool that you can use.
For WD TV drives, you could backup data to a NAS included in that drive.
For WD Elements hard drives, there is no any backup software comes with hard drive.
Therefore, if you are planning to backup a WD Elements drive, you might turn to other backup software for help.
Windows Backup Software Comparison
There are several backup solutions that you might pick to backup WD Elements drives. Windows built-in backup software like File History (Windows 8.1, 10), Windows Backup and Restore (Windows 7, 8.1, 10), and the most powerful Windows backup software – AOMEI Backupper will do you a big favor. But, there are some differences according to the following Windows backup software comparison form:
Windows Backup Software Comparison
According to this chart, AOMEI Backupper Standard is more powerful and comprehensive to backup and restore data. You could use it to do File, disk, system backup, and restore them to identify location; you are allowed to restore individual files if required; you could set an automatic file or folder sync task in Daily, Weekly, or Monthly mode to keep your data safe. Thus, to backup WD Elements drives, we will show you how the AOMEI Backupper Standard works in Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10.
Backup WD Elements hard drives easily in Windows 7/8/10
First of all, you have to download the best free WD Elements backup software – AOMEI Backupper Standard, prepare an external hard drive to save all the data from WD Elements hard drive and connect it to your computer. Then use it to backup WD Elements hard drives, the steps are listed below:
1. On the main console, choose Backup -> Disk Backup.
2. Enter a proper Task Name for your disk backup task.
3. Click Add Disk Choose the WD Elements HDD as the source disk.
4. Select the Destination disk to save all the data from WD Elements hard drives.
5. Click Start Backup to backup WD Elements hard disk.
Tips:
Options: you could comments, compress, split backup image, etc.
Schedule: Set a schedule backup for WD Elements hard drives; backup daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
Scheme: you could enable disk space management via upgrading to AOMEI Backupper Professional.
This software applied to backing up drives in other brands, like Toshiba, Samsung, HP, ADATA, Maxtor, Kingston, HITACHI, Seagate, etc.
After a while, the WD Elements drive will be backed up safely. You have to keep the external hard drive carefully. In some day, you might use the backup image file to restore your hard drive and all the data. In some cases, you will want to backup external hard drive to another external hard drive, or backup SD card, USB flash drive, CF card, SSD to other location, this freeware will help a lot.
Conclusion
As the best free WD Elements backup software for Windows PCs, AOMEI Backupper Standard provides you many other powerful features to protect your operating system, like partition backup, sector-by-sector backup, create WinPE bootable media, etc. The advanced edition – Professional offers you encrypt the image backup file, command line backup tool, incremental and differential backup, restore to dissimilar hardware computer, backup in event triggers mode, real-time sync files or folders, etc. Try Server or Technician Plus edition if you are a Server user.