Experiences with Microsoft File History (Backup) on Windows 10

[Julian]

How do those of you who use (or have abandonned) File History on Windows 10 find it?

My main backup programs are Carbonite to backup to the Carbonite cloud servers (using my own private encryption key) plus Crashplan that backs up to both the Crashplan cloud servers (again using a private encryption key) and also to my home NAS at the other end of my flat on a different circuit breaker. I have also had File History enabled as well with its backup also going to my home NAS. I thought that I might as well enable it since it's in Windows anyway, one can't have too many backups, and it's adds a third point of failure software-wise were both my Carbonite and Crashplan backups to freeze or start creating corrupt backups due to software issues.

The thing is though, I noticed recently that my 2TB NAS had less free space on it than I expected so I looked at what was using the space and the File History folder, which in theory is only backing up the D (Data) drive on my PC that shows as having 317 GB of space used, is size 587 GB but even worse shows as space on disk of 1.13 TB!

Of the 317 GB of data on my desktop PC the vast majority of it is totally static music files, I doubt I have much more than 100MB (a few spreadsheets) that ever change on a daily basis. Data gets added reasonably frequently when I scan paperwork into my archive but those are one-off additions and the PDF files, once created, never ever change again.

I'm also finding File History quite flaky. I sometimes found in the past that it has stopped backing up even though if can see its destination drive on the NAS and the only way that I've been able to find to get it going again is to press the stop-using-drive button and then "re-introduce" it to the same drive again. Right now I've left it disabled after discovering it was set to the backup drive but wasn't actually backing up to it.

I'm beginning to think that I might just keep file history disabled and delete the directories off my NAS but I do like having as many backups as possible, especially when one of them involves using software that is already there so no extra installation necessary, so if anyone has any thoughts here about why File History might be behaving as it is and how I might fix it then I would be grateful.

The NAS is running on a Pi 3+ using Raspbian and the underlying storage is a software RAID 1 array build using mdadm and both drives formatted as single ext4 partitions.

- Julian

[mc2fool]

Well, I have File History backups turned on on both my W10Pro Desktop and W10Home Laptop and, like you, do so not as my main backups but on a why not, can't have too many backups, basis.

Both use a Samba served flash drive stuck in the USB port of my router. The Desktop is wired to the router, while the Laptop is connected by WiFi. The Desktop gets powered (and booted) up and down (full shutdown, not sleep or hibernate) every day, while the Laptop only rarely gets rebooted and is just always either on or in lid-down sleep.

File History on the Desktop just works and keeps on doing so, I can't recall ever having had an issue with it. On the Laptop I occasionally look and see that it has stopped backing up but that's almost always fixed by simply clicking "Backup now" (or "Run now" in the advanced settings). I have had to "re-introduce" it to the drive again but now so long ago I can't remember the circumstances.

I'd always put it down to either the lid-down-lid-up sleep/on use of the laptop (vs fully on/fully off desktop) and/or WiFi not being quite as rock solid as a wired connection, or maybe some interaction between the two. I do occasionally, maybe once a month or so, suddenly find that the laptop and router stop seeing each other, but that's almost always fixed by simply turning off and on the WiFi on the laptop, by going into and out of flight mode.

Those haven't themselves affected File History backups when I've checked, but I do wonder if the occasional transient WiFi glitch that I don't notice but happens to occur when the FH backup is scheduled makes File History decide to turn off. I've not really investigated....

The one thing that I do find painful about FH is that "Clean up versions" is really really slow, even from the Desktop. Ok, I don't expect a flash drive stuck in the USB 2.0 port of my router to be super fast (normal copying files to it runs around 4-5MB/s) but "Clean up versions" plods along at typically just 1-2 items/second (from either PC).

[Breelander]

How do those of you who use (or have abandonned) File History on Windows 10 find it?

...I sometimes found in the past that it has stopped backing up even though if can see its destination drive on the NAS and the only way that I've been able to find to get it going again is to press the stop-using-drive button and then "re-introduce" it to the same drive again.

Like you, I use File History very much as a third line of defence, my main ones being Macrium system images and my own 'homebrew' batch file that make a Full or Incremental backup of my User folder to my network drive using RoboCopy.

Also like you, I've had to 're-introduce' FH to its history folder on my network drive a couple of times. The only times it has stopped working like this has been immediately after a Windows 10 Features update. Upgrades from 1803 on (including the latest one to 1903) have not stopped FH working, so that bug at least seems to be fixed.

Apart from that, FH works reliably for me. As for the (excessive) space yours is using, there are settings in 'Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\File History\Advanced Settings' to help with that. There is also an on-demand 'Clean up versions' you can launch from there.

[Julian]

Thanks. Looks like it's just me then.

I think I'll not delete the backups. My next step will be to "re-introduce" my backup client to the existing backup drive and backup archive already there, try out the trimming tools to see how much that reduces the > 1TB archive size, and if that goes well just watch it for a while and see if this stopping-backing-up thing might have been a temporary issue, maybe slightly peculiar to something in my setup, that has since been fixed by this big cumulative Windows update that I installed earlier this week with no issues.

I would quite like to keep using File History simply for the "why not" attitude that all three of us (Breelander, mc2fool and me) have adopted.

- Julian

[Breelander]

I would quite like to keep using File History simply for the "why not" attitude that all three of us (Breelander, mc2fool and me) have adopted.

Precisely. Once set up it does its job unobtrusively in the background. I've used it to quickly restore the odd file now and then, but don't rely on it as my main line of defence.