Windows 10: File History Not Reliably Backing Up All Changes In OneDrive Folder

I have been having a problem with File History not reliably backing up all changes in my OneDrive folder for several months and have yet to find a solution for it. I have my OneDrive folder selected as one to be backed up, but every time I run a backup, only some changes get backed up. I haven't noticed this issue with any other type of document folder on my PC, as I do a random spot check after each backup.


I also haven't noticed any rhyme or reason regarding what gets backed up and what doesn't.


To the best of my recollection, this started happening when the Files On-Demand option was added to the OneDrive app. I have since unchecked this in Settings, but my backups of the OneDrive folder are still not reliable.


I have found others in this forum discussing this in the past but I was never able to find a solution to the problem, so I am here trying again.

:)

 

Backing Up OneDrive Folder with File History

I am backing two computers - a desktop and a laptop, both running Windows 10 - to an external hard drive via File History. On each computer, the majority of our files are in a OneDrive folder, so I have included OneDrive on the list of folders to back
up. On the desktop, all subfolders in the OneDrive folder back up just fine (Erika's Pictures, Erika's Music, Erika's Documents). On the laptop, Peter's Music and Peter's Documents back up, but Peter's Pictures does not. To get it to back up, I have to manually,
separately, add it to the list of folders that File History includes. Obviously, this is easy enough to do, but I don't understand why it is happening or how to fix it. Any ideas? Thank you.

 

File History not backing up OneDrive Documents folder (but correctly backing up other OneDrive folders)

I have my Documents folder and all my photos located in my OneDrive, so that they are always backed up to the cloud. I have previously successfully also used File History to back up all my user files and
libraries (including the OneDrive folder) to a local external drive and it has worked fine for many years. However, recently I noticed that there is something strange happening with the Documents subfolder in the OneDrive folder of the File History backup
when I went to restore a previous version of a file in OneDrive\Documents and the 'Restore personal files' view showed
only a small number of files and folders, not the whole of the current contents of the OneDrive\Documents folder. Moreover, instead of the most recent automatic backup date showing (effectively) the current state of the OneDrive\Documents folder,
it only showed files that had been modified since the previous automatic backup date. If I manually went backwards in time through the backups, I could see other files in my OneDrive\Documents folder that had been modified previously and were still currently
in that folder, but for some reason were not showing in the 'Restore personal files' view of the most recent backup.

I thought something must have gotten out of sync with the File History database, so I stopped the file history service, deleted the
%UserProfile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\FileHistory folder, deleted the File History backup folder from the external drive and then rebooted the PC. As expected after rebooting and going into Control Panel -> File History it showed that
File History was off and there was no File History drive set. I then created a new File History backup to the external drive and checked that there were no 'excluded folders' set. Absolutely everything else got backed up correctly in the new backup, except
for just the OneDrive\Documents folder, which wasn't created at all in the new backup. For example, my OneDrive\Pictures folder backup correctly had all 22.3GB of data comprising 13,067 files and 255 folders, exactly as expected.

I then modified a test file in my OneDrive\Documents folder, clicked on 'Run Now' in File History and then checked the backup. There was now a Documents folder showing in the OneDrive folder, but it contained
just that one test file I had modified.

I tried the suggestion I had seen in a previous discussion thread about this problem of manually adding the full OneDrive\Documents path to the list of backed up folders. It was already there in the list,
but I tried adding it anyway. It made no difference and the folder is still not being backed up.

Why isn't File History backing up all of the folders in OneDrive and selectively refusing to back up just the Documents folder?

 

File History Not Backing Up OneDrive Local Files

Here is a little more information based on some recently observed File History behaviors. The way I have backed up One Drive files in the past has been to add my One Drive folder to my documents library. Up until the Fall Creator's update, that worked fine.
The other day, I disabled File History, and added an individual folder from OneDrive to the documents library. I re-enabled File History, and it backed up that folder. I then tried adding another folder to the documents library, but File History did not back
it up. Today, I disabled/re-enabled File History, and this time it backed up the files and sub-folders in both of the OneDrive folders that I had added to the documents library.

This is not a workable solution, but maybe it provides some insight into what is going on with File History in terms of how it identifies the files that get backed up initially. Along with this, File History does backup any files from any of my OneDrive
folders when those files change; it just doesn't back them up as part of a baseline backup unless I follow the steps above.

For what it's worth, I also tried creating a new library that contained only the OneDrive folder, but File History just ignored it.

Thanks!