Windows 10: File history skipping files / folders

I have custom libraries set up to back up my X:\Pictures directory and it's been backing up just fine. I dumped a large amount of pictures to a sub folder and didn't get around to deleting the bad ones before file history threw them on my history drive. No big deal, I went through the files at their main location and deleted the bad ones and then simply deleted the entire sub folder from the file history drive and then forced file history to run.

It's no longer backing them up.

I changed my settings to back up every 10 minutes and keep forever and forced again.

There's about 800GB of free space left so that's not an issue. I tried a restart and I even tried to wait the 10 minutes. It's still not backing them up again.

If I delete a file inside that sub directory and leave it in the recycle bin and then go to previous versions for the sub folder, it shows previous versions. When I choose to restore from one, it tells me the file is no longer in the location. It seems there's an index somewhere that needs to be deleted that's telling file history that I have files backed up that I manually deleted. In relation to that, what's the best practice to remove backed up files that I wouldn't mind backing up again. The scenario I pointed out happens quite often actually. I take a thousand pictures and don't get to deleting the bad ones before file history backs them up.

:)

 

Adding folder to automatic backup causes 0x80070032 error

Good point and thought I'd test this. I mounted partition D:\ to folder - C:\DDD. Then added one of the sub-folders under DDD to the Documents library. Ran file history backup, and found that it silently skipped the sub-folder

Same happened when I tried to:

Add a subfolder to a custom library

Add the entire folder DDD (mounted volume) to a custom library.

In every occasion, File History skipped the location, but backed up rest of the changes (in desktop, documents etc).

But no error message what so ever.

 

Windows 10 Pro 64: File History not copying folder

I have File History turned on to copy multiple folders to a back up drive. There are approximately 1000 folders being copied. There seem to be around 50 folders that don't copy to the back up drive. The missed folders do not show up in the File History
error log. Here is an example of the path of a folder that does not copy over:

D:\shared\Audiobooks\Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D_\The Willpower Instinct_ How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It (Unabridged).aax

(This folder contains a single aax file)

There are a number of other folders in the Audiobooks directory that do copy over properly.

Questions:

1. Why doesn't the File History error log indicate that a folder was skipped?

2. What is wrong with the folder/file name that is preventing File History from copying the folder and contents properly?

P.S. - In the data being backed up, I have many instances of folders with ".", "," and "_" that do copy over properly.

Thanks in advance.

 

Hello and welcome! *Smile

File history does keep a catalogue of all the files and if you look in your File History folder you will see two folders one called Configuration and the other called Data. It sounds like you deleted from Data but not from Configuration. I would not try to mess around with these directories as I do not understand how the catalogue/config files work.

I am not sure how important the file history versions are to you and if your File History is now corrupted in some way you might be better off deleting the whole File History folder and starting a new Run of File History for everything. At least everything you now have will be backed-up but you will lose all the previous versions of files if you do a lot of editing to them. As I say this is only an option if you do not need older versions of your current files.

 

I actually did just that. I only keep one copy of my backups and haven't had any catastrophic failures lately so I just formatted the backup drive and started over. I attempted to stop using the drive and then just re-assign but it wouldn't save in the same old dir and made a (2) instead. Bummer, I'll have to dump my files to a folder that's not backed up while I wait to go through them.

Anyone have suggestions how I could have done this without starting over?