Backup Vs File History
Evolve,I agree with your assessment and I really worry about the apparent retreat from having a business quality baseline/core functionality to a less useful but maybe flashy consumer feature. I would much rather have had file system improvements to VSS on thedesktop to allow VSS to target higher latency data targets with single instance storage.
Backup And File History Software
I would have been great to be able to have incremental VSS backup targeting a consumer NTFS NAS or thumbdrive.From what I can tell File History is actually less useful than Shadow Copies of Shadow Folders - except that you can 'target' the storage to a non-hard drive.In my 12 test desktop recoveries and 3 real desktop recoveries, File History has been useful once in recovering data and that was a single file/directory. PLEASE bring back last known configuration. Every time I install a beta driver which does not workI have to perform a full refresh - and then reinstall all the apps/tools. Very big pain.File History really seems to be purpose built for end user error type file recovery - i.e. I deleted a single file or changed a file that now I want an older version - rather than for data backup.Even if you can get your applications to store the data into a folder library (and why the heck can a library not be stored on a memory card or other removable device?), without the VSS block level access the files seem to have to be closed for the Historyagent to make a copy. Thanks for reading and for your contribute.In its actual state the File history feature looks like a serious step backwards even compared to the old windows 7 files backup, both from the point of view of functionalities and the point of view of security (See my other post at)About using a nas as the backup target of the wbadmin command backup it is possible and it works the same incrementally way it works when you perform the same command on a local ntfs volume, that is, in both cases, the backup is performed at block levels.
Theonly thing that you lose when you perform an image backup on a share is the ability to create shadow copies on the share in order to retain old copies of the backed up volume. Anyway you can avoid this limit by creating on the target smb share a vhdfile large enough to host your backup and then attaching this vhd before performing the image backup. A vhd file can be attached if it is hosted on a smb share and, once mounted, it acts like a local ntfs drive, that is it is able to store (only) its ownshadow copies.
The limit is that, once attached, the vhd file cannot be used by other network users, that is the file is locked and cannot be opened or modified by multiple users simultaneously.About the file history targeting a non-hard drive I am not sure I correctly understand what you mean, if you refer to storing the backup to a network share that was possible also in the old windows 7 files backup.About the restore options I do not agree. System restore is still present in windows 8 and it works exactly like it did on windows 7 that is it uses the volume shadow copy service to create the shadow copies at each critical software or driver update. You caneasily restore the system Best regards. Using an FS journal is probably much more efficient than storing shadow copies of files and I can understand the change.
Seagate Backup Vs File History
It may also even use less disk space. A journal is like a transaction log for a database. There will always be other solutions thatwill use Volume Shadow Service to backup files. Maybe Microsoft will make a consumer grade backup product that is based on Data Protection Manager. As for corporate environment, I've always used third party backup solutions, like Backup Exec, and I have recentlystarted migrating some of those systems to Data Protection Manager. Those products use Shadow Copies to perform backups.I am a bit surprised that Microsoft has removed the Windows Image Backup GUI application from Windows 8, but I have always used wbadmin.exe anyways and I am glad they left that in Windows 8.