Built-in Backup Tools Windows 8.1

While Windows 7 and Vista had the Backup and Restore applet, Windows 8 introduced File History as the default backup option. File History is a replacement for Previous Versions from Windows Vista and Windows 7. Unlike Windows 7, File History does allow backup to network shares for all versions of Windows 8 which is a good thing and makes the software far more useful. The downside is that scheduled System Backups have been removed from Windows 8 and 8.1. You can still manually create a system backup, and you can perform a system backup to a network share, but you can’t schedule this to be run. Also, File History only performs a backup of files in your libraries (Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, and Desktop folders), as well as any files saved locally from OneDrive. Still, the most important information on your computer is your files, so let’s look at how to enable this feature to protect them:

  1. Windows 8.1 adds the ability to enable File History from PC Settings, however the options are just to enable File History and to select a backup target, so these instructions will focus on the Control Panel applet which offers more advanced options. To launch File History, right click the Start button and choose Control Panel. Next expand System and Security and select Save backup copies of your files with File History.

  1. If File History has never been configured before, the system will scan for available disks that it can back up to. You can choose the disk, or use the link Select a network location to configure the disk.

  1. Once configured, simply click Turn On, and File History is enabled.

  1. If you’d like to modify your File History settings, that can be done in the File History applet. To exclude folders, choose Exclude Folders where you can select folders you wish to exclude from the backup. Unfortunately, you can’t add user defined folders here which you do want backed up. To add folders to be backed up, you either have to add that folder to an existing library, or create a new library.

  1. Advanced settings are also available in the File History applet, and these allow you to specify how often to run the File History backup (from ten minutes to daily) as well as specify how much of the PC’s disk to use as an offline cache (2% to 20%) in the event you are travelling and not able to access your backups, as well as to specify how many versions of files to keep.

Unlike Windows 7, File History’s interface is all in the control panel. It’s not as elegant as Previous Versions was, where you could right click any file or folder and see a list of all versions, but the interface is fairly straightforward and does show you a list of all of the backups:

  1. Launch File History by right clicking the Start button and opening the Control Panel. Next expand System and Security and select Restore your files with File History.
  2. The interface that opens up will be a listing of the locations you are backing up. The most recent backup will be displayed by default. To restore a file, navigate to the folder it was in, select the file by clicking it, and then press the green Restore button to restore it to the original location.

  1. If you’d like to restore it to a different location, right click the file and choose Restore To and then browse to your path.
  2. To navigate through your backups, you can use the skip buttons at the bottom of the page. The easiest way to sort though is to navigate to the folder where your file is (or was), and it will display only the backups that have changes in them. If a folder hasn’t been modified since you enabled File History, there will only be one backup for it. This is an easier method than trying to figure out which day you deleted a file.

Overall, File History is a decent built-in utility, but as is often the case, attempts to make the process easier to use often result in a system that is less powerful, and that’s certainly the case with this. Windows 7 lacked network backup for some versions, but overall the Windows 7 backup utility offered more features, especially with the automatic system backup. Previous Versions is also an easier way to find changes made to a file. File History also lacks a method of backing up files outside of your libraries and OneDrive folders which is not ideal by any means. Windows 8.1 forces you to make a system backup manually, and that can be done as so:

  1. Right click the Start button and open Control Panel. Expand System and Security, and then select Save backup copies of your files with File History which won’t actually be used, but is the shortcut to the System image backup.
  2. On the File History applet, click on System Image Backup in the bottom left corner.
  3. Choose a location for your backup. If it’s on a network share, you can optionally enter login credentials if required. Click Next.

  1. Now you will be prompted to confirm, and if you are happy click Finish. The confirmation dialog will estimate how much disk space will be required, and warn you that only a single backup file will be kept. In other words, there is no versioning.

If you are using File History as your backup method of choice, you should definitely create at least one system backup to allow you to restore to a new hard drive or machine if necessary. If you ever need to restore this, you can create a recovery drive by choosing the Recovery option in the File History applet. If you don’t have another computer to create this on if needed, it’s a good idea to create one ahead of time.

It is possible to create full scheduled backups, but only from the command line using wbadmin but this is not something I would recommend for the average user.

Built-in Backup Tools - Windows 7 Built-in Backup Tools - OS X
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  • wumpus - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link

    The whole point of RAID *is* to protect you from things like bit rot. The difference between RAID5 and RAID6 is that RAID6 protects you from two rotted bits in a single sector (more specifically, two different drives with failures in the same location). You should be able to avoid this with RAID5 by periodically reading the entire drive and correcting any single error you find (called "scrubbing").
  • Mr Perfect - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link

    It's not really a sure thing with the RAID though. The array has no idea which version is correct, and which one is rotten. The best it can do is take a consensus and go with whatever version of the file the most drives agree is correct. They did an article about bit rot over at Ars Technica, and the author's RAID 5 happily used the rotten version.

    http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014...
  • bsd228 - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link

    not, really, wumpus. The whole point of RAID (minus 0) is to protect you from a disk failure. By itself it does not deal with bit rot at all. On a mirror, who is right? In typical implementations, disk 0 is presumed to have the correct copy. ZFS (and I believe MS's knockoff, ReFS) implemented scrubbing with checksumming to give a means to identifying the correct copy.
  • beginner99 - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link

    I use Microsoft's free tool SyncToy. With it you can synchronize folders to anywhere else, like an external hdd. And of course only updates are synched and you can specify in which direction to sync. I use it to backup my media collection. The external hard drive can then be stored off-site (at work). The advantage I see with this is that the media files are copied over and are readable on the backup directly. You can take the external hdd on the road and have your full media collection at hand. With image files you will have to first restore them before being able to use them.

    Important documents should be stored in the "cloud". This can be a simple encrypted zip sent by email and it will be stored on the email server (say gmail) or whatever. That was possible like over a decade ago already.
  • gsvelto - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link

    I do most of my backups from Linux: I use rsync to sync my home directory and other relevant files outside of /home and ntfsclone to backup my Windows drives. The latter option is definitely slower than incremental backups or somesuch but allows me to restore a Windows installation very quickly w/o need for reinstalling. It's also handy when moving Windows from a hard drive to another.
  • AlexIsAlex - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link

    Another aspect to backups is bit rot. Both on the backup media (are the files in the backup still good?) and on the live media (do I need to restore this file from backup, as it has become corrupted?)

    For a decent backup system, I want checkusms stored with the backed up data, and verified regularly. I also want the backup to actually read all files to be backed up from the source, even if they are not supposed to be modified since the last backup, and check that they still have the same checksum. Unfortunately, this takes rather a long time, but I don't see any alternative to discovering months down the line that some rarely accessed files have become corrupted, and worse, been backed up in a corrupted state.
  • boomie - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link

    >Windows 8 fixes that issue, but creates new ones by no longer allowing automated image backups
    Well, I didn't think supposed IT pros at anandtech would be so casual as to be afraid of command line.
    If you cannot live in this world without regular image backups, who prevents you from adding a task in task scheduler with wbadmin call?
    Come on now.
  • ruthan - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link

    There are extended tutorials to Windows native backup setting, but for Winserver essentials, here are very compressed version of descriptions. Could you more explain it - for example - "Once the connector software is installed" - this is big shortcut - after installation is backup set up from server or from local machine?
    How is linux / macs backup support, because of this is real different, Windows backup solution isnt now big problem. From my experience - best solution are form Acronis and Paragon, but they have lots of limitations and known issues.
  • davidpappleby - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link

    We have two laptops, and two desktops. Each has a boot drive and a separate physical backup drive for images using acronis. All pictures/music/data reside on the server which has separate backup drives for its OS and data (again with acronis). I'll be looking into S3 again as a result of this article (last time I looked I thought 2tb was too much). My wife has an external drive we use as off site backup of her important data (downside is that that is current only).
  • Mikuni - Thursday, May 22, 2014 - link

    Mega gives 10GB for free, encrypted storage, why wasn't it mentioned?

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