Windows 8 File History backup creates duplicates

Anonymous
2013-02-05T16:18:46+00:00

I have run the Windows 8 file history since I installed W8 last October and each time I run it I get another duplicate set of documents, photos, video's, everything. After I accumulate 5-6 copies that amount to 45gb of space on my extended hard drive I delete the file history file and start over.

I'm using Windows 8 on a laptop and therefore do not have the HDD connected all the time. I run backups occasionally and whenever I run it all files are duplicated over and over again. By running it occasionally I mean sometimes daily, sometimes weekly. I've made all sorts of modifications but nothing works.

This is not a new problem and there are several complaints to Microsoft regarding people with this problem so I thought I'd ask the question on this forum.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w8itprogeneral/thread/14cedd95-b3b0-4830-be00-da793dda9e27/

My main question is, is there a different backup / restore application that will work besides the W8 File History? Does the old backup from Windows 7 still work?

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Performance and system failures

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-04-21T10:25:35+00:00

    Hi,

    Since this thread already exists for a long time, we recommend creating a new thread so that other Community member can assist you better.

    Regards.

    So , Michelle, should we wait for the fall update, and hope the problem is in the mix of fixes?

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-04-20T06:58:20+00:00

    Hi,

    Since this thread already exists for a long time, we recommend creating a new thread so that other Community member can assist you better.

    Regards.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-04-19T22:13:58+00:00

    The duplicated reappeared after a long time. Today, this was the scenario: 

    I was making some changes to the partition of my D: drive (second internal hard drive) using a third party utility. A power failure during the operation shut down my PC unexpectedly. I managed to restore after a while the structure of the partition and my files appeared again, but soon I discovered many of them were corrupt. Several pdf files, images etc. would not open. 

    What I did of course was to restore all of the them through File History using the last available backup. All files, however, were still on my machine, although some of them corrupt, as I mentioned. So I selected "replace to destination" when asked for File History to copy them from the backup drive to the internal D: drive. The process finished successfully and all files were corrected. 

    Then it was again when I run File History, that it started to create duplicates! Theoretically, it shouldn't copy anything back to the backup drive, since both files were of the same timestamp (they had just been restored from the latest backup)!

    I believe this is not the same occurrence that most people have faced in the past (including me), but it is still a serious bug! File History will create duplicates when you actually use it to restore a file.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-09-22T09:27:59+00:00

    From my experience this happens when the original file attributes can't be written or differs to the backup target: I was doing backups to a ntfs drive with compression enabled but since source files where not compressed they were getting duplicated.

    I've noticed this prior to anniversary updated and did not try using a network drive as a backup target, i've not tried other scenarios as file history is now working for me.

    btw: i own a synology nas and I created an iscsi target for file history, doing so allows me to hard limit backup space.

    Well that makes sense even though it is STUPID. Is it true of e.g. indexing properties also?

    If only Microsoft would take note and fix this then this would be an excellent backup tool. But until they do its a useless waste of space.

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