So I've acquired a new Win8 pc and I'm contemplating my back up scheme. Previously, I was using Crashplan for offline back up. I'm thinking about skipping that and using SkyDrive to back up my photos & doc, because it's free and (sort of) built in. My music is backed up via Amazon's cloud music service (and works beautifully). But I'm not sure about a local back up. I have my various file on a partition on hard drive and was planning on mirroring that partition to a WD Passport drive. But now I'm wondering about using File History. If I understand correctly, I need this on anyway, to do auto backups of, say, Word docs as I'm typing? But I could be wrong ... And is it saving multiple copies of files? I don't really want that. In short, I'm not sure if the new File History is a useful alternative to running disk mirroring software. What do you think, sirs?
Those copies are saved to the same disk (and partition) as the current files, which makes them worthless as real backups. They are just a version history. You still need to do proper backups to a physically separate drive.
No, you can change the File history location. I have it set for the usb backup drive. You can also set what percentage of the drive you want to designate for File History use.
Okay, I was talking out of my ass here. I thought File History works like the old Vista/7 feature but it's actually a fully featured backup system. Judging by this walkthrough you shouldn't need another backup for your personal files if you use File History to put them on a USB stick. Although personally I'd still do an extra manual backup to a drive that's not permanently plugged in, just in case some malware wipes all the currently attached drives.
I'm giving File History a shot. It does store multiple versions of your files, similar in a way to Apple's Time Machine. This makes it helpful for trying to revert document changes, but I have to admit I prefer disk mirroring because my applications and their settings are more important to me than my change history (if I care about document versions, I already have it in a revision control system). You should use it in combination with Win 8's "refresh image" command to have a full backup. A nice tutorial for creating custom images is here. I'm planning on buying a new hard drive soon-ish and I'll test the ability to Win 8's tools to restore from a custom image then.
After dinking around, I don't think File history is the back up program I want to rely on. I turned it on so that I can have versioning in Word - but honestly, I don't rely on versioning much. It just doesn't fit how I work. Also, I do 99% of all my first draft writing in OneNote, where nothing ever gets deleted and my OneNote notebooks are stored on Skydrive now, sooooooooo .... I'm not real happy about SkyDrive, either, mind you. The separate SkyDrive desktop program should be built into the OS, not a separate download. Plus, it should mesh transparently with the default Documents/Pictures/Music folders rather than setting up a whole different folder structure so that you either have to copy files by hand into the skydrive folder or stop using the default folders altogether and just save your files in the skydrive folder in the first place. If I say I want to use the Skydrive application I should never have to think about it again. Instead, it's constantly up nose making me think about where I want to save things. So annoying. At the moment, I'm using GoodSync to mirror the default folders + my desktop Skydrive folder to my external hard drive. I haven't decided what I want to do about offsite storage but I don't really want to pay for it any more. I'll probably use Google Drive as a back up for pictures or files. I think I can set good sync up to do that. I'll probably keep my music on Amazon though, since I like their cloudplayer and I buy all music from them anyway.
