This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
I would like to use the File History feature of Windows 8 and so far it has been working fine. However, I have come across a scenario and need input on practicality for the following:
2. System crashes and new HDD required
4. Time to use File History for restore.... BUT
From what I understand you cannot "point" the new Windows 8 machine to use the external drive with previous File History. You will need to do a manual copy and paste from the external USB (by selecting the appropriate file in the File History directory on the USB drive).
The problem is, File History appends the date and time stamp, thus the file name changes. For example, MYDOC.DOC become MYDOC.DOC ((2013_04_04 18_27_46 UTC).
How do you remove the parenthesis from the file name when copying the file back to its original location or is File History not a "system restore" type utility. Whilst the parenthesis will not stop applications working (like WORD, OUTLOOK etc), it looks horrible and creates these long file names that is unwanted.
Thoughts/suggestions/comments?
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
I just had to try to do this, and I was able to (on a new Win8 machine) point at the previous backup by clicking Drives and then selecting my backup drive (a network share in my case). Then I was able to check "I want to use a previous backup on this File History drive" and it displayed my existing backups on that drive. Finally, I was able to do the regular (if not very intuitive) restore files by clicking the settings icon in the upper right of File History.
Hope that helps,
Glenn Gailey
Update: If you have an Office 365 subscription and a decent internet connection, OneDrive now comes with 1 TB of free space and works quite well for backing up documents and photos. It still struggles with long filenames (or invalid characters), big files and email backup but it's workable.
You also get free backup software with personal cloud devices, which are good for saving audio and video. I didn't have much luck with the cheap Western Digital My Cloud solution, but the Synology solution looks good so far. Windows 8 and later (or Win 7 Pro) can also store system images on these devices.
Just restored files from a Win8.1 PC to another Win 8 notebook PC which I am taking on holiday. Restoring from File History is fine after selecting the drive from with File History on the new PC, selecting the Backup and the folders I wanted and then clicking a green button middle bottom of the screen which looks like a 'refresh' button but is actually the instruction to proceed with the restore of the folders selected. As a user-interface it has to rank as one of the worst ever designed. Obscure or what? I don't know what planet the programmer came from, but clearly it wasn't planet Earth.
OMG. Thank you so much. My laptop crashed & wouldn't reboot ironically 2 days after I ordered a new one, but luckily I had been using file history. However, it has taken me a week to stumble on your response. Perhaps Windows could put these steps on their support page? I had been at the restore screen, but it never crossed my mind to click "Drives" first considering I just wanted to restore. Thanks a bunch, the thought of copying all of my files with new names was awful.
No solution found, and yet more problems. I discovered my file history backups have been failing for a while with no notification and with no information in the log other than error "201". There's no further information and apparently no way to diagnose the problem. It's possibly caused by a pathname that's too long or contains "forbidden" characters but I can find no way of narrowing the problem down or avoiding it. If you google for it you'll see it's a common complaint.
I've also found in the past that backups were incomplete because files were misclassified as "executable" (for example, php files). That's also a common complaint.
I've also had trouble restoring from a system image because the hardware had changed (because the old hardware failed, which was why I was attempting to restore from backup).
I've now stopped using any Microsoft backups at all because they're just not reliable when it comes to restoring from them. Even worse, they appear to work (no error messages at backup time) and you don't discover the problems with restoring until it's too late.
The problems seem to be well known but I tried reporting them and there's really no effective way to do that. And THAT is the root cause here - there's no effective way to report (and track) problems and hence they never get fixed.
