Windows 10: File History-Not running auto cleanup of old versions.

I use File History set to backup file versions daily and to keep for one month. The problem is file versions older than one month are not being cleaned up automatically. I have to manually clean up versions to remove the old ones.
Does anyone know of a fix for this?

:)

 

Windows 10 File History Exclude and Cleanup interaction

I think I’m stuck. I don’t think I can recover the space in File History occupied by the Outlook 2016 files without losing all the other files. So far as I can see, all files already in File History are treated the same, regardless of whether their folders
have now been put into an Exclude List. So a Cleanup action which deletes Outlook files is going to delete all other files of the same age.

This is what I have done:

I have five user accounts on this PC, of which four have Outlook 2016 installed, and two of those have a lot of email activity and are what have filled up File History.

I put \username\Documents\Outlook Files\ into the Exclude List for the four user accounts which run Outlook. I ran Cleanup in the two Outlook-heavy accounts asking it delete anything over two years old; I chose that time period because I want to keep everything
(except Outlook) for ever, and I only started this backup system about 14 months ago when I moved to Windows 10.

Cleanup reported that it found nothing old enough to delete and WinDirStat shows the Outlook files are still in File History. The Cleanup text says ‘all other files and folders, such as versions that were excluded or removed from your libraries, are also
deleted’ so I had hoped that it would (a) delete old files from folders in the Include List (but it would find none) and (b) delete all files from folders in the Exclude List. However, it seems to have kept anything younger than the specified time, even though
its folder is now in the Exclude List. I suppose that that is reasonable – you might want to keep old copies of files which you no longer want to backup – but that’s not how I understood what it says.

I closed all user accounts and restarted the PC. No difference.

What to do next?

I could choose the most drastic Cleanup option and delete all versions of files except the latest, but I think that would leave a lot of Outlook files still in File History. And it would defeat the purpose of File History, which is to enable recovery of
earlier versions of files.

Is there no way to free up the space occupied by all the Outlook files?

I could take my current backup drive offline and buy another big hard drive and start backups and File History on it all over again, without the Outlook files this time. Would I then be able to recover files from the File History on the drive I have taken
offline?

Any suggestions?

I note that you seem to have to administer File History at the user account level. One of my user accounts has administrator privileges but from within that account I was unable to add folders from other user accounts to the Exclude List.

 

File History Drive Full - Now What

Hi Don,

File History drive usually contains older versions of Windows on your PC. To clean your File History drive, we suggest that you follow these steps:

• Open the Control Panel (small icon view), and then click on the
  File History.
• On the left pane, click on Advanced settings.
• Click on the Clean up versions link in the Versions
  section. Note: The Clean up versions link will not be available if you don't have any File History versions available on currently selected drive.
  • 
    
    
• Select the time period of versions you want to delete, and then click on
  Clean up.
• File History Cleanup will now start discovering items for the specified time period, and delete them if available.
• If it didn't find any versions of your files that were that old, click on Close, and repeat step 4 above using a shorter time period if you like.
  If the cleanup completed successfully, click on OK.
• You can now close If the cleanup completed successfully, click/tap on OK.
• You can now close the windows.

Let us know if the steps above helped you to resolve your concern.

 

Win10 - File history - Old backups are not being auto removed when drive is full.

Deepika,

The links you gave only refer to general information about deleting files or doing a disk clean up in windows.

This is not the problem I am having.

In File History, there is a setting called 'Until Space is needed'.

All the documentation I can find in this setting indicates that File History is supposed to automatically delete older File History data if my backup drive gets full, without me having to do some kind of manual delete or clean up process. This feature is
currently not working. File history will simply fill up my backup drive. When File history finds that my backup drive is full, File History is throwing an error complaining the disk is full. What it should do is delete older backups to make space for the
more recent data.

Again I ask is there another setting I need to change, or is File History broken in it's auto delete feature?

Thanks.