Wd Backup For Mac

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Summary: Have you received the error: 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer' on Mac? Don't worry, this article will focus on how to fix WD My Passport is corrupted or unreadable on Mac. To avoid the loss of important data, you'd better recover data from the unreadable WD My Passport with iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery.

Oct 18, 2019  Select your storage device as the backup disk When you connect an external drive directly to your Mac, you might be asked if you want to use the drive to back up with Time Machine. Select Encrypt Backup Disk (recommended), then click Use as Backup Disk. An encrypted backup is accessible only to users with the password. How to Back Up Your Computer with Time Machine. Mac macOS (10.5 and above) has an excellent built-in backup tool called Time Machine. Once you plug in a hard drive and set up Time Machine, it will work automatically in the background, continuously saving copies of all your files, applications, and system files (i.e., most everything except for the stuff you likely don’t need to back up, such. Free download WD Discovery WD Discovery for Mac OS X. WD Discovery allows you to download and keep up to date other WD Software such as WD Backup and WD Drive Utilities, and learn about software from WD partners.

WD My Passport external hard drive is able to work on Mac and Windows for data transferring or backup. It is popular for its auto backup and passport protection features, keeping your files and folders safe. However, there are times that the WD My Passport becomes unreadable or corrupted on Mac. You may be greeted with errors like 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer', which prevents you from accessing all data stored on the drive.

It's so frustrating when you meet this issue. If you are struggling to solve this issue, you will find a collection of verified troubleshooting steps.

Table of contents
1. Causes of WD My Passport not readable on Mac error
2. How to fix 'WD My Passport unreadable' on Mac error?
3. Conclusion

Note: If you received the disk not readable error with three options: Initialize, Ignore and Eject, please don't select 'Initialize'. Initializing the drive will erase all of the data that is currently sitting on the drive, which makes it difficult to recover data.

Causes of WD My Passport not readable on Mac error

Let's at first take a look at the complaint from community.wd.com:

'My WD My Passport 2TB Portable External Hard Drive has suddenly become unreadable on my laptop (MacBook Pro Server with macOS 10.12 Sierra) and I have tried on a MacBook Pro 2011 running 10.13 High Sierra with the same results. Any suggestions to fix my unreadable WD drive?'

The good news is, even though you have been prompted with an error message, at least your WD My Passport drive is recognized. There are many reasons that can lead to a drive not being readable, but essentially this is because the internal file system is damaged. Some of the possible reasons for this error are described as follow:

  • Mac malfunctions
  • Outdated drivers
  • Faulty connections
  • Write-protected drive
  • The WD My Passport is not formatted
  • An internal file system error or bad sectors
  • Virus/malware infection to your WD My Passport
  • Incompatibility issue between your WD My Passport and Mac machine
  • Accidental interruption or removal of your WD My Passport during transferring data

How to fix 'WD My Passport unreadable' on Mac error?

In most cases, the issue can be repaired with a simple initialize. But this operation will remove all data stored on this drive. Are there any other ways to fix WD My Passport unreadable issue on Mac? Of course, just try these solutions one by one:

Solution 1: Re-insert the WD My Passport

The first and foremost thing is to remove the WD My Passport safely from Mac and then re-plug it into the USB port properly. If the external hard drive mounts and appears on the left sidebar of Finder, then you can access the drive. However, if the WD drive still won't mount or the error persists, continue with the next method below.

Format Wd Backup Drive For Mac

Solution 2: Check the Mac computer

The next step is to check whether your Mac machine has a problem or not. Just connect a different storage device to your Mac. If this error still pops up, the problem may refer to your Mac machine, you can restart your Mac to see if everything works well. Otherwise, if you can see the other drive in Finder, the problem is associated with the previous WD My Passport.

Solution 3: Check if the WD My Passport is encrypted

The WD My Passport for Mac corrupted or readable issue can also happen if the drive is encrypted by BitLocker. By default, the Mac computers cannot recognize a BitLocker encrypted drive, which means you are unable to read or write BitLocker encrypted drive on Mac.

You can insert the drive in a PC and then turn off the BitLocker encryption so that it can be read on Mac. In addition, you can access a BitLocker encrypted drive with the help of a third party tool.

Solution 4: Update Mac drivers

Drivers enable one or more hardware devices to communicate with the computer's operating system. If drivers are out-of-date, a variety of issues will happen such as the disk not readable error. Apple handles all system and driver updates for your system. To check if any updates are available, please do the following:

  1. Step 1: Go to Apple menu and select 'App Store'.
  2. Step 2: Click on the 'Updates' button located on the top pane.
  3. Step 3: Check available updates for your system and applications.

Solution 5: Repair the WD My Passport in Disk utility

Disk Utility is a built-in used to erase, format or manage internal disks and external storage devices. Genopro. The most important feature of Disk Utility is First Aid, which helps detect and repair any issue with your disk. Here is how to run First Aid on your Mac to repair the unreadable WD My Passport:

  1. Step 1: Open Disk Utility from your /Applications/Utilities folder.
  2. Step 2: Select the unreadable WD My Passport in the left side bar.
  3. Step 3: Select the 'First Aid' tab.
  4. If Disk Utility tells you the disk is about to fail, back up your data and replace the disk. You can't repair the disk. Otherwise, continue to step 4.
  5. Step 4: Click Run.
  6. If Disk Utility reports that the disk appears to be OK or has been repaired, you're done. Otherwise, you have to back up as much of your data as possible.

Solution 6: Recover data and erase the WD My Passport

If the error still exists, you have no choice but erase the WD My Passport. But keep in mind that you will lose all data store on this disk. If you didn't back up important data, you should get lost data back with free Online data recovery software at first.

Step 1: Recover data from the unreadable WD My Password on Mac

If you are not sure which data recovery tool you can trust, iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery is highly recommended to recover data from the unreadable or corrupted WD My Passport. This free Mac data recovery can scan and recover data from unreadable SD cards, internal Macintosh hard drives, external hard drives, USB flash drives, etc. iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery provides a complete Mac data recovery solution even if your Mac won't boot/turn on, your device is failing, inaccessible or has lost a partition.

Moreover, iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery can also recover recently or permanently deleted files, recover data from formatted hard drives, recover data from unmountable hard drives, and recover data from inaccessible drives, etc. This software supports recovering documents, photos, videos, emails, and music files. It's fully compatible with macOS Catalina 10.15/Mojave 10.14/High Sierra 10.13/Sierra 10.12 and Mac OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7.

1. Download and install iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery on Mac.

2. Launch iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery.

3. Select the unreadable WD My Passport and click 'Next' to search for lost files.

4. Preview the searching results, choose those you want and click 'Recover' to get them back.

5. Go over to ensure all lost files have been successfully restored.

Step 2: Erase the unreadable WD My Password in Disk Utility

1. Open Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities folder.

2. Click on View > Show All Devices in the menu bar.

3. Select the WD My Passport from the list of devices on the left pane and click the'Erase' button on the top.

4. Name your drive, select a file system format and then click 'Erase'.

Now that you've formatted the WD My Passport, the disk unreadable error will be resolved and the drive can be ready to use. Then you can copy the recovered data back.

Solution 7: Ask data recovery service for help

My Passport For Mac Backup

However, if the solutions above don't fix the WD My Passport unreadable issue for you, or your WD My Passport even won't show up on Mac, it's probably the drive has been physically damaged. In that case, you should send it to a local data recovery service or replace it with a new one.

Conclusion

Hope these solutions have helped you fix the WD My Passport corrupted or unreadable issue. If you have any question about this article, stay in touch with us for further assistance. Specifically, we'd love to hear if you have other solutions for this issue.

Introduction

We live in a world of the Internet. The majority of us use computers, laptops, mobiles, tablets and other such devices to search for data, work with data and store such data on our devices. It is evidently clear how important it is then to keep all our data secured and safe at all times. Backups are a necessity in the data processing world. Most of us think of backups as merely copying or archiving content from our laptop or computer's local disk to an external device like USB flash, external hard drive, CD etc. When we perform such backup, we are only going half way. An ideal backup should mean that the data is stored in at least two different locations at all times. This ensures that we have a plan B in case the original backup gets damaged due to data corruption or hard drive failure.

WD Backup Software

WD backup is a user-friendly backup application which is quick and convenient. It protects your files, documents, images and other such data from data corruptions, virus attacks, and other such data loss scenarios. There are two backup locations that are used in the process - on-premise backups and off-premise backups. Primary storage gets saved to a WD drive. For secondary storage, backups are stored on a cloud. WD backup software can efficiently run a scheduled backup as well as real-time updates of files.

However, there are some common issues that WD backup software faces. These include:

  • WD Backup Software is not compatible with Windows 10.
  • WD Backup Software can only be used to create a backup of your files. It cannot create a backup of the applications and the Windows operating system as they are not supported.
  • WD Backup Software gets stuck, fails, or causes errors quite often.
  • WD Backup Software does not allow you to back up the files which are in use, i.e. they are open.
  • WD Backup Software has a hard time backing up large files. It consumes a lot of CPU resources and makes your computer slow in the process. In fact, some of the large files may not even be included in the backup.

Why AOMEI Backupper?

If you want to invest in a good alternative to WD backup software, AOMEI Backupper is the perfect choice to make. AOMEI Backupper does not have any of the above-mentioned limitations. Not only is it compatible with all the versions of Windows, but it also makes the backup procedure fast and efficient.

It can easily backup large files without putting too much pressure on the CPU and does not slow down your PC. AOMEI Backupper allows for a complete system or disk/clone backup and can back up your operating system and other applications together with files that are being used.

  • Allows you to take automatic, full, incremental and differential backups of system, disk, partition and files.
  • Supports system restore, disk restore, dissimilar hardware restore, partition restore and selective file restore.
  • Supports disk clone, partition/volume clone, flexible clone, system clone and command line clone.
  • Supports Windows 10, Windows 8.1/8, Windows 7, Vista, and XP (all editions, 32/64-bit)

How to Set Up Data Backup with AOMEI Backupper

How To Use Wd Backup For Mac

AOMEI Backupper works efficiently on all the versions of Windows including XP, Vista and Windows 10/8/7. It has a user-friendly interface and can be easily used by a novice to take backup of their files.

Let's have a look at the procedural steps to learn how you can create a backup using AOMEI Backupper:

Step 1: Download and install AOMEI Backupper on your computer. Now, select 'System Backup' under the 'Backup' tab.

Step 2: As you select system backup, the system will appear by default in Step 1. For 'Step 2' select the destination path. This location can be your local disk, WD, external hard drive or USB flash wherever you wish to save your backup.

You have the option to choose the 'Backup Options' and 'Schedule' as per your requirements.

For Backup Options:

Wd Backup Drive For Mac

There are five different settings that you can choose. Each setting allows you different features:

  • General – This function allows you to comment, encrypt backup and receive notifications via email.
  • Compression – You can compress your backup at three different levels namely, 'None', 'Normal' and 'High'.
  • Splitting – Splitting allows you to split the large files when you are backing them up.
  • Intelligent Sector – This backup function includes two features – 'Make an Exact Backup' and 'Intelligent Sector Backup'.
  • VSS – This feature allows you to carry out your backup without any interruptions and restart requests by Windows.

For Schedule:

You can choose for an automatic backup daily, weekly or monthly on time set by you.

Additionally, you have the option to choose the type of backup you wish to create – Full Backup, Incremental Backup or Differential Backup.

Incremental Backup and Differential Backup

Wd Backup For Mac

Let us understand the basics about different types of backup before we learn how to create an incremental backup and differential backup using AOMEI Backupper.

  • Full Backup: When you create a full backup it includes all the files, folders and the entire system's backup in totality. This means there are old, new as well as modified files in the backup.
  • Incremental Backup: Incremental backup only includes the backup of files that have been added since the last incremental backup or full backup. For example, if you are creating an incremental backup for the first time, it will be based on the last full backup. The subsequent incremental backup will be based on such last incremental backup and only include the additional files after the last incremental backup.
  • Differential Backup: A differential backup includes the last full backup and the additional latest differential backup. All the files that have been altered or modified since the last full backup form a part of a differential backup.

Wd Backup Macbook

Now, let us continue with the step-by-step procedure of taking a differential and incremental backup:

Western Digital Free Backup Software

Step 1 and Step 2 remain the same as above. Go to the 'Home' tab once you finish with the above steps and have taken a full backup of the system.

Western Digital Backup Drive For Mac

Step 3: After selecting the 'Home' tab on your screen, you will see the system backup image that you just created after finishing Step 1 and 2. Click on the 'Backup' option and choose from the drop-down list whichever backup you wish to create – incremental or differential.

Step 4: You can write some comments if you wish. Then hit 'Start Backup'.

Backup Tips

  • If your system drive is a dynamic disk, system backup in standard version will not be supported.
  • It is advisable to back up your C: drive using System backup instead of Partition Backup. This is because if you choose partition backup, you will not be able to access your system for a while after it gets restored as the booting may take longer.