I have the 1TB Western Digital My Book Essential which has the USB3 connection (compatible with USB2). I use EaseUS Todo free backup program. First I make a complete image of my internal HDD, and then I can schedule backups on whatever schedule I wish. I love this program for its ease of use after struggling with Acronis. I am very pleased also with the WD external drive. They do stand behind their warranties and replaced an internal HDD that failed, without question. All hard drives are subject to failure, so I think you're okay as long as you stick with a name brand.

Thank you for taking the time to respond. My computer has been warning of USB device that it does not recognize every time I log in with my password. Today with your advice I unplugged the power lead from the drive and the computer did audible blip. Reconnected it. Unplugged the USB cord at the drive, audible blip, reconnected it audible blip. Disconnected the USB at the back of the computer with audible blip and reconnected at the front with audible blip and the light on the drive is now ON! My Book J now again shows up on the Computer window. Need to move the USB connection back to the back of the computer if possible as the two front USB ports are often used for other things. I am left wondering exactly what happened to make it stop working. Thanks for your help.

It really does not matter that you only need a small drive, they are gone. Replaced by larger volume drives, planned obsolescence. You could remove the existing drive from your enclosure and replace it with a new drive but the savings seem minimal. Then you have the aggravation of doing the task. You would need to determine if the current drive is 2.5 or 3.5 inches and whether it is SATA or PATA (IDE 40 or 80 ribbon data cable) As the drive appears to have failed there is no loss to your attempting to remove the drive if you feel so inclined. Tigerdirect has hard drives from $70 but they also have complete external drives for $90 so you would be saving $20 for a DIY job.

I have many times had to Replace Hard Drives that Crashed (at least 5). Use to take care of a couple Small Businesses computers. If it hadn't been for the Cloned Drives I would have spent countless hours reinstalling everything and restoring files. I too have lots of systems to oversee. No, many aren't mine and I can only recommend Backing up, cloning, etc... That doesn't mean that one will be done! We have 5 Laptops, 1 Desktop, and 1 Tablet all on Windows 10 here at my house. I only Clone 3 of those computers! My old boss lost her home computers hard drives twice, loosing everything before she learned to listen to me! I did get her started on a Cloning Program and it did save her the next time her computer crashed. Not sure what this woman did to her computers, but she had many problems. I do recall her saying they had power outages in their area all of the time, but she did have her pc on a UPS Battery Backup system. She had a ton of valuable information on her home computers, as did her small businesses computers which I maintained for her. Never had any problems with the Work Computers, maybe because she didn't use them (The Office Manager and Employees used them)! Yes, even a dormant hard drive can die, although I've never had that happen. The Business Computers I Cloned usually had Two Clones made. Usually One copy was in the Safe at the Workplace and the other usually stored in a Safety Deposit Box at a Bank!