By Delia / Last update January 6, 2023

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Overview for WD My Passport backup software

WD My Passport drive is a trusted portable device to store, organize, and share your computer data. It comes with stylish design, high capacity, and software to perform premise backup or off-premise cloud backup.

More specifically, WD My Passport backup is usually accomplished by the integrated application WD Backup, which is easy-to-use and capable of protecting your photos, videos, music, documents, and suchlike important files. You could set up a schedule to auto back up them from your system to My Passport drive, like hourly, daily or monthly.

Wd My Passport

Can WD Backup satisfy all your backup needs for My Passport drive?

There are 2 common scenarios for WD Passport backup:

  • Back up files to My Passport drive in case of data loss
  • Back up My Passport drive as double insurance

Both cases involve different storages. However, WD Bacup software itself only supports limited devices. According to the user manual, you can set internal hard drive/supported external storage drive/Dropbox as source, and supported external storage drive/Dropbox as target. The supported external storage drives here include only My Passport Family, My Passport Wireless Family and My Book Family.

If you want to backup WD My Passport to local drive or other brands of external drives, WD Backup won’t work.

enlightenedWD Backup End of Support: The WD Backup software will no longer available for download, and technical support will no longer be provided effective August 22, 2022. You can continue to use your product and the application, but no software updates will be provided in the future.

What other WD My Passport backup software can you use?

If you want a WD Passport backup software with higher compatibility and more complete backup options, AOMEI Backupper Standard is a considerable choice. It is working on all Windows PCs and supports various locations as backup source or target – internal/external hard drive, USB drive, NAS, network share and cloud.

It’s not limited to WD products so you can continue using it even after you’ve completely replaced the device. Meanwhile, the schedule options are more comprehensive than WD Backup, and therefore help you to plan automatic backup better.

AOMEI Backupper Standard

Windows Backup and Restore could be another alternative to WD Backup in Windows 11/10/8/7, but the speed is not satisfactory, and there are even more possible errors during the backup. So in the following article, I’ll focus on how to backup My Passport drive with WD Backup and AOMEI Backupper.

Way 1. How to back files to My Passport drive with WD Backup

For computer users who simply want to backup important files to WD My Passport drive, WD Backup is an effective tool to schedule incremental backup.

Every time you disconnect and reconnect a backup target or source device, WD Backup software will rescan the source device for new or changed files and resume the automatic backup.

Steps to set up WD My Passport backup with schedule

1. To use WD Backup in Windows 10, you can either download the application from its official site, or install it from the WD software installer included in the drive.

2. Remember to connect the WD My Passport drive, then click Back up Files in the main interface.

Wd Backup

3. Select your WD storage device or cloud service as the backup target and click Next.

Select Device

4. Click Edit Schedule to set up My Passport auto backup, like Hourly, Daily or Monthly. Then you can click Edit Files to include files you want to backup from your PC or Dropbox.

Edit Schedule

5. After finishing, click Start Backup and wait for it to complete.

Start Backup

What if WD My Passport backup not working?

There are chances that WD Backup cannot detect your device, or prompt you “WD Backup has stopped working”.

For the first case, check the detailed list here to see if your connected drive is supported. If yes, the reason might be the process “WD Backup Drive Helper” isn’t started with WD Backup. To fix it, you can try following operations:

  • Check anti-virus and end point protection software on your PC to ensure WD Backup is allowed.

  • Ensure the status of WD Backup Drive Helper services is Running when WD Backup is started.

  • Ensure the WD Drive is connected directly to the computer instead of a USB Hub.

  • Ensure the drive firmware is up-to-date

  • Download and install the latest version of WD Backup.

  • Download and Install WD Drive Utilities.

And if your WD Backup has stopped working, you could try:

  • Run a disk check and fix fragmented disk

  • Ensure the computer system is Virus and Malware free

  • Ensure the owner and system have permissions to access the files.

  • Shorten the source folder path if it’s too long.

  • Make sure the files you want to back up are not in use. Otherwise, please stop them first.

These are some possible fixes when WD My Passport backup not working. If your problem can still not be solved, try the alternative below.

Way 2. How to do WD My Passport backup with AOMEI Backupper (more flexibly)

AOMEI Backupper Standard is a specialized yet free backup program for Windows 11/10/8/7/XP/Vista. With it, you can easily backup files from PC and other devices to WD My Passport, or vice versa.

☛ It contains complete options to optimize your data protection. Just as WD Backup, you can set up a schedule to automate the backup, and back up only changed files each time using incremental mode by default.
☛ Moreover, you can manage the backup compression level, image splitting, operation priority, comments, email notification, etc. as you like.
☛ If you upgrade to Professional edition, you’ll enjoy even more advanced features, like file filter, differential backup for safer recovery, backup scheme for auto deletions, and dissimilar hardware restore.

Here I’ll take the free Standard edition as example to show you the operation. Download it to proceed! For server users, try AOMEI Backupper Server.

Download Freeware Win 11/10/8.1/8/7/XP
Secure Download

Steps to perform WD My Passport backup with AOMEI Backupper

1. Connect your WD My Passport drive and make sure it can be detected by Windows. Then, launch the disk backup software, go to Backup tab and choose File Backup.

File Backup

Besides on-site backup, you can also use Cloud Backup to backup files or folders. It comes with a cloud drive AOMEI Cloud as well as 1TB of free storage, and you have 15 days of free access after registration. And you can also backup operating system, selected partitions, or the entire disk according to your needs.

2. Choose Add Folder or Add File. Then selected the connected WD drive as the target.

Add Folders Files

If you want to back up files on NAS or network, choose Share/NAS > Add Share or NAS Devices to add the path. As for files on cloud drive, just select the local folder of corresponding cloud service.

Share Nas

In advanced editions: you can click the funnel icon beside the selected path to include or exclude the files with specified extensions.

3. To perform My Passport auto backup, click Schedule Backup to choose Daily/Weekly/Monthly, and do further settings like specific time point or interval. By default, it will run a scheduled Incremental Backup.

Afterward, click Start Backup and wait for it to complete.

Schedule Settings General

This is how you can backup computer files to WD My Passport drive. If you need to backup WD Passport to PC or other external drives or cloud drives, just select the backup source and target accordingly.

Other advanced features you may need

◉ Once you set up a scheduled backup, the accumulated backup files may fill up your storage space. To avoid such situation, you can Enable Automatic Backup Cleanup in Backup Scheme to automatically delete old backups.

◉ If you want the backup task to auto execute based on specific events instead of a certain frequency, you can choose Event triggers (including log on/log out, startup/shutdown) or USB plug in.

◉ You can also perform differential backup. Compared with incremental backup, it uses more backup time and disk space, but takes shorter recovery time as it requires only one full backup plus one differential backup. For more differences between them, check: Incremental or Differential Backup.

Enable Automatic Backup Cleanup

◉ If you want to clean up the WD My Passport to free up space, or prevent data from falling into the wrong hands, you can use Disk Wipe feature in Tools tab to remove everything on the drive.

Conclusion

WD My Passport drive is paired with WD Backup software to perform automatic file backup, but if you are not satisfied with its compatibility and features, or find it not working on your computer, you can also use AOMEI Backupper as an alternative to do WD My Passport backup in Windows 11/10/8/7.

In addition to backup and restore, AOMEI Backupper could also be used for disk migration with the Clone feature. It enables you to clone HDD to smaller SSD, SSD to another SSD, or even move only OS to new hard drive.