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No Backup, Connect Error

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Background: I purchased a Western Digital 6 TB MyBook external drive for data and system backups on my Windows 7 laptop.  I did so because my wife has a Windows 10 desktop with a Western Digital MyPassport that uses WD Acronis True Image 2016 Edition successfully. 

The 6 TB MyBook arrived with exFAT formatted disk, and the WD utilities will backup successfully for data files, but not for either a Windows System Image or a WD Acronis True Image.  I always get a Connect Error and system image is never backed up.

I discovered that my wife's MyPassport is formated NFTS.  She gets both data and systems backed up successfully using Acronis and/or other backup routines.

Should I abandon the exFAT formatting on the WD 6 TB and reformat to NFTS?  I have no idea how to correct Connect Error from Acronis to exFAT formatting or if there is another solution to this. 

My laptop is Windows 7, Home Premium Edition, 64 bit system, SP1, fully updated. 

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LouieG,

Welcome to the Forum.  I believe that the formatting of your drive as exFAT is done by WD so that both MAC OS and Windows can both use the drive.  I think your connection issue is not related to the drive formating however.  Can you please tell us how the drive is connected to your Windows 7 machine?  I would suspect via a USB cable but am not sure here.  Did you install the software that came with the WD drive on your laptop?  It sounds like you did and using that you can create file/data backups to the drive with the built in backup tool of the WD software.

Did this drive come with an Acronis True Image backup app?  If yes it might be that the True Image app even though included with the drive needs to be downloaded from WD and installed prior to usage and if that is the case and you have not done so could be the reason for the connection error.

It looks like Exfat is not supported as a destination for disk or partition backups

https://kb.acronis.com/content/48458

 

This is not a surprise, as exFat was (if I recall correctly) developed for (and optimised for) media files (video and photoes) and is less robust than FAT or NTFS.

Ian

The external drive is connected via USB cable with independent power plug. Yes, I installed WD utilities directly from the WD drive, and I have copied those to my desktop for now. Those are allowing file backup. The drive did not come with the WD version of Acronis.  I downloaded that from WD support site.  When I encountered the problem, I then downloaded trial version of Acronis 2017 from Acronis site. Both WD and Acronis versions present the connect error problem. I did online updates for both before trying to use them.  Wife's Win 10 works fine with WD external drive using Acronis, and it is NFTS, so that is why I have wondered about reformatting my drive..........but I have never done that before (I know how to do it), but did not want to do so if there were other operational issues I might not know about.

Thanks for assisting.

You should be fine in formating the drive to NTFS.  It will take some time to do that on a drve that large.  Since you have copied the existing utilities off of the drive you will have those if needed later.  Formatting the drive will remove all data from the drive. 

As Bobbo pointed out exFAT is not a supported file system for True Image 2017.  As I stated earlier WD uses the exFAT file system to enable larger than 4GB file sizes on these drives to retain both Windows and MAC compatibility.