Windows 10: Windows automatic backups overwrote my files

I had a hard drive die (2nd backup to die in a 1 week span) and during the restore process I plugged in my external hard drive which contained the backups. During this process all but 5 minutes or so I realized the backup is changing in size so I quickly rushed to automatic backups and turned it off. The damage had been done, automatic backups deleted my entire Pictures folder with about 10 years of photos. There seems to be no recovery process for restoring deleted files by the system itself. Please help, it's Christmas and I'm having a meltdown. I had 3 backups in place and now my last backup just got overwrote by windows itself. I feel like it's just a file system structure issue but I have no idea where the data is. It's a WD drive 2TB external, all the best file restore software cannot find the files, file history, backups etc. all gone. We're talking about 1 TB of family videos & photos. I know it's gotta be saved in some kind of .dat or dmp file or something please help!

:)

 

Automatic backup

I'm trying to setup automatic backup. In windows 7 I have it setup but it doesn't backup everything in that folder it backs up only stuff that was edited which causes confusion. Is there any easier way to automatically backup everything in a single folder to my external hd

 

File History does not backup automatically

Hi,

Thank you for writing us back.

I would suggest you to go through the below steps:

• 
  Press Windows key+I.
  
• 
  Click on Update and security.
  
• 
  On the left pane, click on backup and select on under automatically back up my files.
  
• 
  Click on more option under on button.
  
• 
  Select every hour (default) under back up my files.
  
• 
  Select forever (default) under keep my files.
  

Also refer the link below link and check if it helps:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/set-drive-file-history

Also work in Windows 10

I hope this helps. Please post back with the status of the issue and we will be glad to assist you further.

 

Automatic backup

Forget using the automatic backup thing built into Windows, it sucks in my experience.

Instead use a Robocopy script and use task scheduler to automatically run it every night.

This is the script I use:

Code: robocopy <source> <destination> /MIR /B /w:5 /r:5[/quote] Save that to a bat file, then tell task manager to run it every night. That will back up everything in the folder nightly.

Obviously the source is your source directory, and the destination is your destination directory.

If you want to back up multiple directory, you can just keep adding lines to the same bat file and they will all run when it is executed.

So if you wanted to backup your user documents to a folder called Bakcup on the external drive F:, then it would look like:

Code: robocopy "C:\Users\username\My Documents" F:\Backup\ /MIR /B /w:5 /r:5[/quote] And remember, when you are using a path that contains a space, you need to put the quotes around the path, if the path doesn't contain a space then don't put quotes around it.