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Author Topic: Any experience with File History backup in Win 8?  (Read 1875 times)

David Eckels

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Any experience with File History backup in Win 8?
« on: March 25, 2014, 09:12:07 am »

I just built a new computer and in addition to an SSD for OS and program files, an SSD scratch disk, a 10K rpm hard drive for LR and PS modified images and other data, I also have two external 4 TB USB 3 drives, one for storage of original NEF files and one that I thought I would use for backup purposes. I can turn on "File History" for that drive and have copies of modified files written there automatically from the other drives at a frequency I choose. Does anyone have experience with File History? I know this would not cover a fire or flood, in which case I could consider cloud backup; necessary? Appreciate any advice.

David

Asus Z87-Pro mb, i7 4770K cpu, 32 GB ram, Cooler Master EVO 212 cooling, Asus Geforce 780 3 GB vc, Cooler Master N600 mid tower, Win 8-64.

Alan Goldhammer

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Re: Any experience with File History backup in Win 8?
« Reply #1 on: March 25, 2014, 01:18:50 pm »

I don't have any experience with it but for past versions of Windows (I'm still on Win7 and will stay there until it is no longer supported by MSFT) I have found integrated Windows backup programs inferior to those commercially available from other vendors.  My reading of File History is that it's not a true backup program.

For the past three years I have been using NovaBackUp and it works quite well.  It lets me prepare a system image in case of OS drive failure as well as back ups of my data drive.  It also allows me to prepare a system recovery CD which will perform a restore of the OS in case of catastrophic system failure.  Back up speeds are much faster than the Windows program.
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Farmer

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Re: Any experience with File History backup in Win 8?
« Reply #2 on: March 25, 2014, 04:37:37 pm »

It's not really for backup - it's for versioning.  If you save over something, you may be able to go back and recover a previous version.

Windows Backup itself (Win 7 or 8) is very solid and functional.  I've done test recoveries and I've done a real recovery using it - no issues at all.  If you don't have an original installation CD/DVD then it will let you make a recovery disk, too.

Many of the commercial options, such as Alan mentioned, can offer additional functionality or may be faster and so on.  If you're looking at going to the cloud as well, you might like to look at Crashplan which will let you setup a local backup as well as a cloud one (same backup, two locations).  It's one of many options available.
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Phil Brown
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