File history can't delete old backups

vicf1 said:

How can I fix this, please?
running win home 19044.1706

File History cleanup failing with "Element not found" is a common problem and has been around for a long time. It appears to be a bug that MS are in no hurry to fix, judging by this thread....

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...d-9bd14546a175


There are no obvious known fixes, if you find one I'll be very interested to know as I have the same problem. I had it in Win10 and I still have it after upgrading to Win11.

Some workarounds that a few have found to work are: turn off File History and set it up again from scratch to use the same history drive, and/or increase the available free space on the history drive to at least several hundred GB. None of them worked for me though.

If you just want to decrease the space file history occupies on the backup drive, the turn it off, delete the history from the backup drive, set it up again and run a new file history backup. That's what I had to do.

File History is no longer Microsoft's recommended file backup method in Win11, OneDrive syncing is now what MS recommend with W11. File History no longer even appears in Settings, it's been relegated to just appearing in Control Panel now.

Megahertz said:

"Element not Found"
Maybe there is nothing to clean.

No. It is a real error condition. If there's nothing to clean then (when it used to work) it reported that it could find nothing to clean.

Megahertz said:

Another bug that MS are in no hurry to fix

As I said, it's still included in W11 but hidden away. I suspect MS will declare it to be a 'deprecated feature' shortly.

I gave up on File History for the same reason/error message. That & I couldn’t add non default folders to the backup.
Macrium is good enough for me.

I suspect File History is going to be deprecated at some point too.

Helmut said:

The obvious first thing is to check is the drive used to store the File History.
Check the list of backup folders.
Look at the Event log, that sometimes provides clues as to what folders to exclude.

I have been using File History for 8 years back to Windows 8.1 and now on the latest version of Windows 10 and have never seen that error message.

I have tried all the obvious things, none of them work.

I have been using File History for years too, and until about a year ago it worked faultlessly. It still does - in all respects except cleaning up versions.