Windows 10: File History not working

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.

:)

 

File History not working

Hi Graham,

There might be a chance that there are some system file corruption that causing you to unable to open the File History. Having said that, we suggest that you run the SFC tool. You can refer to this article for the steps:

Use the System File Checker tool to repair missing or corrupted system files.

Let us know how it goes.

 

File History not working

Since updating to Windows Home 1703 File history has stopped working for the last four days even though it appears to be running there are no recent backups. If I try to remove old backups I am told that there are apps using file history,
this is not the case. Can anyone offer any advice to resolve this?

Many thanks

Graham

***Post moved by the moderator to the appropriate forum category.***

 

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

 

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.