I'm hoping someone has experience with the WD Smartware in practice...

I've got an older XPsp3 workhorse, as well as both Vista & Win laptops, and want to dump all my 'excess buildup' onto one portable HD.

I'm a little behind the curve on these drives...
For example, in browsing the drive's pdf manual, I noticed the 'smartware' is built-in to the drive itself, but it doesn't backup the OS or software.

I wasn't really looking for a backup HD, more just a 'get rid of all the dup files, old CDs, mebbe useful someday programs, webpages, etc' stuff onto one organizable place.

I think using the same drive for both backup & archiving is asking for trouble.

Also, I have Norton 360 on the lappies, it wants to do the backing up too...

Any advice for best practice these days?