Windows 8 - 'File History' backup. Does anyone use it?

ancient_mariner

ancient_mariner

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I'm still learning my way round W8 and came across this option in PC Settings > Update and recovery. It *appears* to offer data backup to an external drive, possibly even incrementally. When I beganm investigating the software was sufficiently smart to interrogate my network and connect to my NAS so that it could be offered as an option as a backup drive. There are just 2 things I miss from my old Macbook: the trackpad and Time Machine, and I wonder if this would work in place of TM?

At some stage I'm going to have to find an backup solution that's less time consuming and better regulated than occasionally dumping half a terabyte of data on an external drive.
 
There is a tutorial on using it here:
http://www.howtogeek.com/74623/how-to-use-the-new-file-history-feature-in-windows-8/

The only draw back is essentially that it only backs up your user data. If for example, like me, you store your Lightroom catalogs on a different disk drive, there's no way of using the file history feature.
I'm looking at using a scheduled task that uses robocopy to mirror data onto my server. That in turn is incrementally backed up - should do the job quite nicely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy
 
Thanks Daniel, I'll take a look there.
 
I have recovered machines a few times from Windows backups, usually when the official 'corporate' backup solution wouldn't work. We all have different experiences.
 
I've been using it for about a year now. Not (touch wood) had to use it to restore so far but every time I've checked the latest files have been there on my backup drive.
As far as I can see Microsoft have got this one right.
 
I use Dropbox to save my catalogue.
For system backups I take 6 monthly images of my OS drive. constant incremental backups to NAS and yearly DVD burns.
I've had to recover several times and went well
 
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