Seagate Expansion Desk 3TB not available to Windows File History?

[80-watt Hamster]

The drive in question is USB 3.0, and is visible to the operating system. Oddly enough, I used to use this drive for File History just fine, but had it offline for... I dunno, probably a year. There was one significant change in the interim: I migrated platforms from B75 to Z170. According to MS web documentation, one simply selects available drives from Backup settings. Any suggestions?

 

[80-watt Hamster]

No one? Man, I was at least expecting to get mocked for using file history.

 

[Morbius2021]

Nah, nothing wrong with using what's available, although that sounds suspiciously like incremental backup to me.

Windows Backup for servers can use multiple destination drives but the whole windows Image backup system is a bit wonky and tends to lose track of historic data if things get complex or the backup chain history gets too long.

Shadow drives on the server side of things are nice, BUT they really slow down things if you have a heavy change load on the data volume.

The only negative in using either of those methods for your backup system is you still have a single point of failure in the backup media. How old is that 3TB drive?

if its over 3 years old or if it has had 3 years of active ONLINE time get another one for reliability reasons anyway.

If you had something that was drive redundant hardware wise, i.e. RAID 1 or RAID 6, NAS or External HDD it would be a much safer option, or better yet, "CrashPlan" would allow you to do the same thing with an encrypted option in the cloud and also locally. The system allows for both options to be used. Plus the data can be password protected as well.

Granted "CrashPlan" isn't free but with practically unlimited storage it sure is nice. I guess its a matter of how much you value your data in the end.

PS, if you were wondering Crashplan runs about $10.00 a month for the "pro" plan, its relatively fast but depending on how much data you have to safeguard it might take a while to backup your content to the cloud initially. It also provides "unlimited" storage and supports multiple versions and file sets.

..

 

[80-watt Hamster]

Nah, nothing wrong with using what's available, although that sounds suspiciously like incremental backup to me.

Windows Backup for servers can use multiple destination drives but the whole windows Image backup system is a bit wonky and tends to lose track of historic data if things get complex or the backup chain history gets too long.

Shadow drives on the server side of things are nice, BUT they really slow down things if you have a heavy change load on the data volume.

The only negative in using either of those methods for your backup system is you still have a single point of failure in the backup media. How old is that 3TB drive?

if its over 3 years old or if it has had 3 years of active ONLINE time get another one for reliability reasons anyway.

If you had something that was drive redundant hardware wise, i.e. RAID 1 or RAID 6, NAS or External HDD it would be a much safer option, or better yet, "CrashPlan" would allow you to do the same thing with an encrypted option in the cloud and also locally. The system allows for both options to be used. Plus the data can be password protected as well.

Granted "CrashPlan" isn't free but with practically unlimited storage it sure is nice. I guess its a matter of how much you value your data in the end.

PS, if you were wondering Crashplan runs about $10.00 a month for the "pro" plan, its relatively fast but depending on how much data you have to safeguard it might take a while to backup your content to the cloud initially. It also provides "unlimited" storage and supports multiple versions and file sets.

..

Image backups are stored in a separate location, so this is something of an "extra" failsafe. CrashPlan is an interesting-sounding option. I generally like keeping my paltry amount of data on-site, but wouldn't necessarily be opposed to cloud backup by an operation whose revenue model isn't predicated on the sale of user data (YKWIM).

The drive I'm trying to use for File History is external (and also hits your chronological age limit, if not the active one), and I can work around this, but would love to figure out why it used to work, but doesn't now. It functions normally in all other respects.