File History not working

Ubtree · 07 Feb 2017

I have Windows 10 installed on 2 PCs, with setups that are very similar to each other. On No. 1 PC, I have successfully set up File History to back up selected folders. However, although I have set up File History identically on No. 2 PC (and have selected folders for backup), File History does not back up any files. It reports "Size of Backup - 0 bytes", and if I try to restore files, it reports "There isn't any history of your files, folders or libraries".

I wondered whether the problem was related to Services, but both the File History service and the Windows Search service are running on both PCs, and AFAIK these are the only 2 services required for File History to run successfully.

I would welcome any suggestions as to what I may have missed.

Steve C · 08 Feb 2017

File History (FH) is somewhat unreliable. My usual fix is this:

File History - Reset to Default in Windows 10

Stop FH from the configuration window
Delete your FH config files at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\FileHistory\Configuration
Restart FH and select to use the same backup drive as before

Ubtree · 08 Feb 2017

Thank you for the suggestion. I've carefully followed it through, but I'm afraid that in this case it didn't help.

As a result of further experimentation today, I now have a better understanding as to what is happening (but not why it is happening) and I agree with you about FH's unreliability.

The HDD of my PC has 4 partitions:

one on which Windows sits
one to which I direct the program files for any application that I install
two partitions for data.

I would like to use FH to backup some of the folders on the data partitions, and nothing else.
As soon as I specify a drive for the FH backup, FH creates a list of folders that will be included in the backup. The folders are:

each of the user folders from the Windows partition
the roots of each of the two data partitions

(I can see that FH might exclude the Windows partition, but I'm surprised that automatically includes the 2 data partitions, but knows to exclude the programs partition.)

If I do not change the pre-allocated folders, FH happily backups everything, but if I customise FH by removing all the folders that had been set up and adding the folders that I want FH to backup, everything goes wrong: FH backs up nothing. This is not how FH behaves on my other PC.

I can live with this situation, but it would be preferable to have more control.