Windows 10: Set up Backup/File History to run regardless of current user

Hi all,

Just wondering what the best way to set up File History is, so that it will run regardless of the user logged in?
I have a laptop shared between me and my wife, and we both have user profiles. These days it's mostly her that's logged in, and I just use Chrome for whatever I need to do. However most of our files (music, photos, documents) are actually under MY user folder. We generally avoid switching users, as the laptop is getting on a bit

What's the best way to set up File History so that it will back up all our files, regardless of who is logged in and without duplication (I.e. my user profile creating a backup set, and hers doing the same)? It can be months at a time that one or other profile won't be logged in, but files can still be created in either account during that time which I would like to back up.

Any thoughts?

:)

 

Windows 10 - Backup - Not Removing Old Files

My company runs about 20 workstations on Windows 10, each is running version 1607. We activated the Backup feature configured in Settings (from the start button not the Control Panel). We set "Back up my files" to run every 3 hours and set "Keep my backups"
to 1 month.

We expected Windows 10 Backup to remove file history older than one month but at least leave one recent copy of each backed up file regardless if it was older than one month. We are backing up to a NAS device.

Backup has been successfully operating for more than one month but is not removing backup file history older than one month. Is there a problem with the "Keep my backup" option?

 

Public user with FileHistory?

Hi everybody. I have a quick question about the file history service available in Windows 10 home. The way my family's computer is set up is as follows: two local user profiles Paul, and Family. Each of the profiles store media specific to who uses that
profile. However, all of the public media is stored inside the Public user folder. Because of how file history works, each user has a backup specific to their user. If I tell file history on each user to backup the entire users folder, two backups appear hogging
all of the space on the drive. Is there a way to have file history disregard the user account that is logged in? For both the family user and the Paul user, I want the file history service to back up the same stuff to the same location. I currently have it
set up to have the family user back up both the family and the public user and the Paul user only back up the Paul stuff. Any ideas?

 

I think File History needs to be set up for each user and its scheduling is often unreliable. You can use a disk imaging program like Macrium Reflect Free to reliably schedule backups of your system and user files. If you only want to backup user files using disk imaging, you could create a separate partition for those files and backup the user partition.

 

Thank you Steve. I was suspicious that was the case, but just wanted to confirm I wasn't "doing it wrong"! I will forget about FH and consider other alternatives.