Hey everyone, I’m looking for a solution to replace windows file history as my default backup solution. I’ve already tried AOMEI and I’m not pleased with their licensing model (you can’t migrate your perpetual license off of a previous machine unless you contact support, and they seldom comply).
I’d love an open source backup tool, if anyone has any solid recommendations I’d greatly appreciate it. I’m not necessarily looking for drive cloning per se, but being able to select external drives and specific folders is a must. Thanks in advance!
Not opensource but a honourable mention for Veeam Backup. They offer a free cut down version of Veeam backup for windows. Limited to a single backup plan but it can backup whatever to whatever, gui file browser to look for the files you want to restore from the backup, and lets you create a usb boot drive for bare metal restore.
Just use a throwaway email, fake name and 000000 as phone number when reaching the download link.
The backup agent you install has no account and runs indipendently
Mainly, it constantly claims my network storage is disconnected in the middle of backups when I can verify it didn’t go down at all and is still accessible. Also, backing up your library by default stinks and makes including external drives a pain and very unreliable in my experience. I can’t risk losing data because it just decided to ignore my drives for whatever reason. A lot of headache, and no automation built in makes it a pretty bad user experience. That’s to be expected considering Microslop so desperately wants you to use onedrive.
I have never used File History, but I’ve been using the old (Windows 7) backup for many years now. It has saved my butt on a number of occasions - corrupt files, failed drives, etc.
Here’s the main differences I found
File History:
Can’t select what you back up.
Periods range from 10 min to daily
Windows 7 Backup:
Select what you back up
Periods range from daily to monthly
I think the second one is meant to be the real data safety solution.
I don’t know how file history does backups, but Win7 uses Volume Snapshot Service, so it doesn’t matter if files are in use or whatever, and it stores them in simple zip files (not even compressed), organized by day, so they are recoverable even without the use of Windows.
It also does incremental backups, with new full backup every year.
The one gripe I have is that system restore forces a new full backup, which given that my backup is over half my backup drive, makes things annoying, as I first have to copy the old backup to another location. On the other hand it has forced me to keep at least 2 full backups, so maybe that’s a good thing? TBH I do wish I could force it to continue doing incremental backup.
It also backs up alternate NTFS streams, which can either be a positive or a negative, depending on your opinion/use case. I’m not sure if external backup solutions would be doing that.
I’m still rocking Windows 10, but I know it’s also still accessible on Windows 11 (if not thru the new settings app, certainly in the old control panel).
