WINDOWS’ BUILT IN BACKUP OPTIONS
IS THERE ANY NEED TO USE A SEPARATE BACKUP TOOL IF YOU’RE RUNNING WINDOWS? HERE’S WHAT IT OFFERS AND WHY YOU MAY DECIDE TO LOOK ELSEWHERE
Before you go shopping for independent backup software, be aware that Windows 10 has its own built-in backup system. In fact it has two: the File History tool that was introduced in Windows 8, and the older Windows Backup client that features in Windows Vista and 7.
You can find File History by searching for “Backup settings” in the Start menu. When you turn it on, you’ll be prompted to select a location in which to store your backups: you can choose any destination you like, including external drives and network shares. Just avoid picking your system disk, though, because you’ll risk losing everything in the event of a hardware failure.
File History keeps continuous backups of selected folders, so you can easily retrieve deleted files or roll back changes. Click “More options” on the Settings page and you can choose precisely which folders are backed up, and optionally exclude subfolders within selected locations. You can also change how frequently File History should run: the default is once an hour, but your options range from every ten minutes to once a day.
The power of File History becomes apparent when it’s time to restore a file. While viewing a protected folder in Explorer, you can simply click the History button (on the Home tab) to open a historical view that lets you step back and forth to preview and access your files as they were at different points in the past.
The downside of File History is that it can’t protect entire drives, only specific folders. It also stores your files in an uncompressed and unencrypted form, meaning it’s not exactly space-efficient, and does nothing to protect your privacy. When it comes to convenience, on the other hand, it’s hard to beat.
Old-school backup
If you prefer a more traditional approach to backup, go back to the main Backup page in the Settings app and click the link labelled “Go to Backup and Restore (Windows 7)”. This will open an old-fashioned control panel window, containing controls for the legacy backup tool.
You can now click “Set up backup” and work through a short wizard, choosing the backup destination and the specific folders you want to protect. Once you’ve made your selection, click Next; you’ll now be able to set a schedule and save your job. It will run immediately, and thereafter as scheduled.
The built-in backup tool is quite basic: for one thing, there’s no easy way to set up multiple jobs (although it can be done by duplicating your backup task in the Task Scheduler and tinkering with its parameters). Compression is applied by default, but there’s again no encryption, and you get no control over incremental or differential operations, so frequent backups may eat up a lot of space. Click Manage Space in the control panel and you’ll get the option to delete the oldest backups and configure how Windows manages the space used by backups.
Alongside your files and folders, the Backup tool can create an image of all the partitions needed to recreate your Windows installation in the event of a system failure. If you ever need to make use of this image, however, you’ll likely need a compatible boot device – and the “Create a system repair disc” wizard that’s provided is so old that it only works with CD and DVD media. Fortunately, you can use Windows 10’s “Create recovery drive” tool to make a bootable USB flash drive that will do the job: when you boot from it, choose “Advanced options” then select “System image recovery” and point it at your backups.
A final word of warning: Microsoft is progressively phasing out the control panel, and it’s made it pretty clear that it doesn’t really consider the old Backup tool to be part of Windows 10. Any backups you make now should be recoverable for the foreseeable future as they’re stored in standard ZIP and VHD formats – but don’t bank on the client itself hanging around forever.
“A final word of warning: Microsoft has made it clear that it doesn’t consider the old Backup tool to be part of Windows 10”