WD Passport software

[TooNice]

Has anyone bothered installing the software that comes with WD Passport? I am weary of bloat and my habit so far as been to reformat the drive as soon as it arrives.

I still have a habit of manually backing up my data, as opposed to using applications for such purpose (excluding online backup) so that is not important for me.

Drive "health" diagnostic tools would be useful if it could detect that a drive is failing before it has failed.. but can it do that?

The password security could be handy if the drive is used to backup private data.. but I am not too sure how it works. For instance, do you need to install an application on each computer you want to use the drive? Though I do not see myself attach a drive with sensitive information on a computer I do not personally own, I still need to consider whether it is something I want enabled on drive with less private data by default.

What do you guys do?

[KeyboardDemon]

I installed WD Smartware on my Uncle's laptop and the backup software meant he didn't lose a single file when his old laptop died. It doesn't seem bloated but it does offer the option to try a trial of the pro-version in an attempt to sell you the paid service over the free version.

Here's a video with a little marketing info about the software.

[TooNice]

Wow, so those are trial apps? Any idea what are the differences between the trial and paid version? Are we looking at crippled features or restriction on how long one can use the application?

[superlattice09]

interested with backup software as well. manual backup is too troublesome especially when I need to do this for a pc and a laptop.

[KeyboardDemon]

Wow, so those are trial apps? Any idea what are the differences between the trial and paid version? Are we looking at crippled features or restriction on how long one can use the application?

Yeah, there are two versions, there's a free version and trial version (a trial of the paid version) so the difference between the trial and paid version is one is time limited and paying removes that restriction. The Paid version allows you to sync your backups with a dropbox account so you can get remote access to essential files even when you are not able to physically access your drive or PC.

[TooNice]

Thanks. If it's time limited (understandable), then it is less interesting since I am already paying for online backup and am happy manually copying to dropbox the files I want to access elsewhere.
I do kind of like the password protection feature, but it's one more than that can go wrong. It's probably extremely unlikely, but presumably not impossible for the firmware to corrupt. So I have to decide whether I prefer the (extremely unlikely) scenario where the drive is taken and accessed by someone, or the (hopefully even more extremely unlikely) scenario that that specific component of the drive corrupts.