Many months ago I purchased a Western Digital 320GB USB/FireWire My Book external hard drive.

Isn't it cute?

Unfortunately, my Dell Inspiron 9300 has a 4-pin FireWire, but the My Book is a 6-pin.  Since I do not have an adapter, I was left to use the slower USB connection.

My intent was to offload a bunch of photos and whatnot from my laptop's 50 GB hard drive to free up some space.  I also wanted somewhere to perform some badly-needed backups and a defrag.

Finally this past weekend I moved over 13 GB of photos to the My Book, and set about to performing my first-ever backup on this laptop.  Yes, I am embarrassed to say that I have had the laptop since August 2005 and had never performed a backup.  Lacking any sort of backup software, I decided to use the WD Backup application that had come with the hard drive.  It is super-simple to use, and my needs were similarly simple: Back up everything in the My Documents folder, except for one folder which contains a read-only subversion checkout.

I tried many times, but could not get it to work.  Each time I started with the Advanced Backup option, chose my folders, performed the backup, it churned for a while, and seemed to finish.  Files were written to the My Book.  But when I looked at the Restore option, there was nothing there to restore.  After researching, I discovered this was because, inexplicably, no project file  (with a .ndz extension) was written to disk.

I finally decided to try the Schedule Backup option, and this worked flawlessly.  I scheduled my backup, chose the folders, and then chose Back up Now instead of waiting for the scheduled time.  This time files were written to the My Book, and the needed project file was also written out to disk.  This allowed the Restore option to recognize that the backup was on the disk.

After the backup was complete, I also performed my first-ever defrag, as well as an overdue Windows Update.  34 updates and an hour or two later, I was all up-to-date.

Now I am well on my way to performing safe computing!