Backing up to an external hard drive

The Omega portable HDD is a 500 Gb model type GDHDU.

I really don't like the way they have this put together. I've gotten better old A-Power drive cases I've put old drives into than how they set this up. On the good side they didn't do like WD and put some fake CD format at the front of the drive, your access is standard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2CrJfvVPQc

http://www.iomega.com/europe/support/english/manuals/hdd_ext/use_drive.html#ntfs

Are you able to see the drive when using the file manager, or in My Computer?

The drive is seen as Omega HDD (G) in Windows Explorer and files can be saved and/ or opened in the normal manner.
Previously this disk contained a Windows 7 back-up and after much difficulty I managed to load most of the backed-up files onto the new Windows 8 computer. I then formatted the disk and tried to setup a file history back-up and the disk is not recognised.
The file system on the disk is the default NTFS.

The following sentence appears on one of the the Omega support websites -

". Since all external drives have been discontinued and are end-of-life products, there will not be any updates in the future."

but some conflict in the software with it. If file explorer works OK in it, but W8 backup program won't deal with W7 backups, then that's a Windows problem. I would search for information on the particular program used for backups between the two, maybe they are not compatible.

I remember I connected and external drive to my PC and it didn't see the drive. Then I remembered that the USB I was using was USB 3.0 and the external drive case was older and I tried it on a USB 2.0 port and it found the drive.

After selecting "Save backup copies of your files with file history" the following appear in the file history window

File history doesn't recognise this drive.

File history is turned on.

In the case of transferring the W7 backup to W8 I overcame the problem by copying the files and unzipping.

There are folk that install over reaching security suites that break such features. If I was there, I'd be looking at any non-stock OS breaking items.
Bob

First of all many thanks to all for taking an interest in my problem

The computer in use is less the three weeks old with pre-installed Windows 8.1. The Omega drive is connected to a USB 2.0 port and only Firefox and Open Office programmes have been downloaded since new. Documents, pictures, music and downloaded videos all transferred from my earlier Windows 7 computer were scanned by a pre-installed trial version of Kapersky Internet security.

Make it a warranty call. It's broke on arrival.

HOWEVER, many of these drives autorun something when they plug in. I'm not there but is this external drive truly just that? Clean of any encryption or other feature?
Bob