I just purchased an HP SimpleSave 1TB external hard drive back up system for my computer. HP's advertising says this is a hands free automatic backup.
It's only automatic the first time you plug it in. When you restart your computer it becomes a completely manual system that tries to start over from scratch each and every time you manually start it. You must either navigate to a certain directory and know what file to execute, or unplug the drive and plug it in again in order for monitoring to start. Even then you must be alert and cancel the impending full backup or the system will spend the next several hours doing a complete backup (again).
There is no way to start only the monitoring software by itself, much less automatically.
If you are a novice computer user you would probably not even know that your system was unprotected. Nowhere in the documentation are you alerted to this procedure.
HP customer service says this is normal operation.
A true automatic backup system would start the monitoring software each time the computer is started and perform incremental backups as files are modified. Apparently HP can't read a dictionary to understand the definition of "automatic".
This is a great example of false claims and false advertising.
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