Win10 File History giving me the fits!
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@MattSpeller said in Win10 File History giving me the fits!:
$0.02: In the future you'd be better off setting up a job in task scheduler to sync folders on the USB drive. That actually works, unlike windows integrated backup solutions (in my experience).
Any business with critical files should at a minimum be using mirrored drives for storage. You can get a Buffalo NAS very inexpensively.
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@IRJ said in Win10 File History giving me the fits!:
@MattSpeller said in Win10 File History giving me the fits!:
$0.02: In the future you'd be better off setting up a job in task scheduler to sync folders on the USB drive. That actually works, unlike windows integrated backup solutions (in my experience).
Any business with critical files should at a minimum be using mirrored drives for storage. You can get a Buffalo NAS very inexpensively.
Sometimes you gotta "run what you brung" as it were - but yeah, totally, there are a lot better solutions than USB HDD
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@MattSpeller said in Win10 File History giving me the fits!:
@IRJ said in Win10 File History giving me the fits!:
@MattSpeller said in Win10 File History giving me the fits!:
$0.02: In the future you'd be better off setting up a job in task scheduler to sync folders on the USB drive. That actually works, unlike windows integrated backup solutions (in my experience).
Any business with critical files should at a minimum be using mirrored drives for storage. You can get a Buffalo NAS very inexpensively.
Sometimes you gotta "run what you brung" as it were - but yeah, totally, there are a lot better solutions than USB HDD
This is alot cheaper and more reliable than playing russian roulette with data then paying an IT guy to fix it because you tried to save $150.
https://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9B-22-165-534&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleBiz-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleBiz-PC--pla--Network+-+Storage-_-9B-22-165-534&gclid=CjwKEAjw97K_BRCwmNTK26iM-hMSJABrkNtb6bJNAnyFcDt3-tA9chhQOd-UNbKgiG3c_BUA2l12XhoCE73w_wcB
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Right now this guy just wants his files recovered.
I can't just copy them from the USB, it's hundreds of gigs and every single file has an appended timestamp on it.
I need the FileHistory system to recovery them.
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@guyinpv said in Win10 File History giving me the fits!:
Right now this guy just wants his files recovered.
I can't just copy them from the USB, it's hundreds of gigs and every single file has an appended timestamp on it.
I need the FileHistory system to recovery them.
If it was win8 before you may require win8 to recover
Was it out of disk space? (the USB)
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Check out this section of the link "Restoring items to an alternate location"
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The guy believes he did the Win10 free upgrade. And when I installed Win10 it didn't require a code or activation or any of that, it knew who I was and went through fine.
I can't say about the Win8 question though. The backed up files are over a month old so I guess it's totally possible he did the backup set on Win8 and then upgraded Win10 after that. Maybe this is why it never started backing up new files?
I haven't read anything about Win8/10 not being compatible though.
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@guyinpv I've looked briefly and I can't see anything definitively stating there are compatibility issues between 8 and 10 with file history. It may just be something with the upgrade, could just be typical shitty windows backups failing. Wish I could offer better man. Upvoted the post for visibility.
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Thanks.
Everything seems to work just fine, it sees the drive, sees the previous backup, seems to connect to it to use, but the Restore screen just says there is nothing to restore, and I see all the files on the USB drive.
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Just for fun.
Try on an 8 machine.
For goodness sake, slap the user for treating file history as a backup.
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File History, is this a new name for Previous Versions?
Yes I see it is.
So it uses vss.
Can you move the FileHistory folder to a network share/other storage, then move them back to this computer, then setup FileHistory again(or not).Or can you just copy the files/folders from the usb drive to the local hdd, then set it all up again
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@Breffni-Potter
To be fair, Win8/8.1/10 treats it as a backup. After all you go in settings and open "Backup" and that's what you see.
Crazy after 72 years Microsoft still hasn't figured out a way to give Windows users a simple backup utility. Half my career is because Windows people never had good backup abilities. They never even figured they needed such things.
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@guyinpv said
Crazy after 72 years Microsoft still hasn't figured out a way to give Windows users a simple backup utility.
Since Windows 7 I've had the ability to backup system images or files with a built in utility and I've used it on numerous occasions.
File history is a new beast using a different method. The original good working tool was still in Win 8.
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File history is not a backup.
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@JaredBusch said in Win10 File History giving me the fits!:
File history is not a backup.
This is a very important point. For me to consider something a backup it must meet this criteria:
It must have the ability to be restored independently from the original system. This means it cannot be dependent on a specific installation or hardware for the ability to restore. You should always be able to restore your backup to another system in case of a complete hardware failure.
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@IRJ said in Win10 File History giving me the fits!:
@JaredBusch said in Win10 File History giving me the fits!:
File history is not a backup.
This is a very important point. For me to consider something a backup it must meet this criteria:
It must have the ability to be restored independently from the original system. This means it cannot be dependent on a specific installation or hardware for the ability to restore. You should always be able to restore your backup to another system in case of a complete hardware failure.
I agree. I call this decoupling and it goes a little farther. If the original system is destroyed it should not automatically take the "backup" with it.
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I don't understand why FileHistory is not a backup.
It is taking a file on your computer and copying it to a backup medium (network, USB, etc).
Then depending on settings, when it sees a file has changed, it makes a new copy with a new time stamp. Could be hourly, daily, weekly, etc. It keeps all previous copies for full date-based rollback capabilities.
It then can be set for when the older copies are deleted. Either a month's worth, or just when drive space is needed etc.
The backed up files are not encrypted, compressed, or put in any weird format. They simply have a time stamp added to their file names.
So far all this sounds like a backup to me.
The only thing that is "proprietary" is the file stamp on the file name. Without the Windows tool to help strip these out and recover only newer files, a fancy script of some kind would have to be used to find the latest files, copy them out, and remove the time stamps.
I used the Bulk Rename Utility to remove time stamps and just copied the files manually. If there had been numerous files with multiple time stamps, it would have made things much harder.
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I think the reason this cant be called a backup is that it doesn't seem to want to work as one. In your OP, you state that you get an error when trying to restore these files because windows doesn't recognize them as restorable. This is probably because the FileHistory application requires some sort of metadata that only exists/existed on the original system drive, which is now gone.
I imagine this FileHistory feature will go down as something to be avoided at all costs, like mobsync.exe
Previous versions I liked. A lot. At least for Windows file shares. This FileHisotry seems like a pain, for you at least. I didn't even know it existed until this thread.
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@guyinpv because it is not a backup. it is a copy of a file. And only files that were modified. If you never changed a file, it will not be there.
FFS this is not rocket science. this is basic definitions.
From my Windows 10 R1607 desktop.
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Windows backup
No more screenshots because I am not going to set it up just to point out the full solution for you.
