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Comment by vee-kay | Hacker News Reader

Instead of Windows Backup (which relies on M$ OneDrive), you can enable (in Control panel settings) and use Windows File History.

File History is a backup feature in Windows that automatically saves copies of your files from specific folders, like Documents and Pictures, to an external drive or network location. It allows you to restore previous versions of your files if they are lost or damaged.

To enable File History in Windows, connect an external drive or network location, then go to Settings > Update & Security > Backup, and select "Add a drive" to choose your backup location. Finally, turn on File History to start backing up your files automatically.

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Ironically File History silently ignores all the contents of any onedrive folders when backing up.

That's cool, I didn't know about this, I'll see if it might be simpler than something I hooked up with a bash script.

wbadmin is the GOAT. Multi version snapshots of the drives, which you can easily mount as they are vhdx

Sadly some of the potential is gimped (point in time restore of individual files) but in a pinch you can grab an eval copy of Server and run it in Hyper-V, attach the backup drive to that, and do it that way

I've used this for a few months and it ended up taking too much space and was quite fragile in my experience.

Even with this and OneDrive enabled, I managed to lose years of family photos when trying to free up space thinking "oh I've got this backed up" and then thinking the same when freeing up space when deleting my backup. I wish Windows could be less confusing...

Windows File History doesn’t eliminate the need for an actual backup of important files, but it’s a convenient feature to be able to quickly inspect or restore random files you changed or deleted recently-ish (roughly a year for me). It’s best to point it to a separate drive/partition and configure it to fill that one up and have it delete the oldest files whenever it needs more free space.

I think you're missing the point. There are plenty of better backup solutions for windows, and the vast majority of them are not Microsoft products.

I am pointing out that existing Windows feature (File History) exists as alternative to Windows Backup (which requires Microsoft OneDrive, which is free only upto 5GB of cloud storage).

You are the one missing the point by suggesting off-the-shelf backup solutions.

For corporate users, getting off-the-self solution as alternatives (even if it's open-source) software may not be easy (corporates typically have strict controls on what software they allow for users, and usually they contractually need to reveal to customers if they are using open-source software), but they can use File History for free, by setting it to back it up to a network path/drive if their IT admins permit.

But if you turn it on just to get the nag screen to go away, then you’re wasting a lot of disk space for no reason.

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