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While this is certainly not comparable to CrashPlan, for the odd Windows System I have at Home, I just setup the builtin FileHistory backup and use my existing

by jo909 9y ago

While this is certainly not comparable to CrashPlan, for the odd Windows System I have at Home, I just setup the builtin FileHistory backup and use my existing Linux Server/NAS as a target storage. As a second step the Linux Server already runs a more sophisticated, encrypted etc Backup to offsite storage, and I just added those folders to that too, but you can of course skip that if you are comfortable without a secondary physical backup location.

saganus 9y ago
Ah... Windows File History. Maybe I'm dense but I've never been able to figure out how that works. Even when I thought I enabled it I never could make it work. The history would just be empty every time. I'm sure I missed something, but I just never figured out what. A follow up question is then , can I restore those files to a non-Windows machine? With CrashPlan I could backup to a Linux server, and if I needed the files I could restore them either to a Windows or to a Linux machine. Can I do the same with File History? or do I have to restore to a Windows machine? or even worse, do I have to restore to the same instance of Windows that I used to backup?
- jo909 9y ago
  It just saves the changed files with a timestamp in the filename, which is good enough for me manually to grab a few files when I'm in a pinch and the Windows System is down. I also have a python script somewhere (downloaded from github) that would keep only the latest timestamp of each file and then remove the timestamp from the filename, so kind of like restoring the last backup in full or from a folder. And I could in reasonable time rewrite that to get out a specific timestamp etc, without needing to read the database and metadata files. I'm not planing to do that as the default restore method, but I'm confident to always be able to get all data I need out of the backup without _ANY_ client software. You can restore to any Windows instance, so to a fresh install, another computer etc.

by jo909 9y ago

saganus 9y ago

Ah... Windows File History. Maybe I'm dense but I've never been able to figure out how that works. Even when I thought I enabled it I never could make it work. The history would just be empty every time. I'm sure I missed something, but I just never figured out what. A follow up question is then , can I restore those files to a non-Windows machine? With CrashPlan I could backup to a Linux server, and if I needed the files I could restore them either to a Windows or to a Linux machine. Can I do the same with File History? or do I have to restore to a Windows machine? or even worse, do I have to restore to the same instance of Windows that I used to backup?

jo909 9y ago
It just saves the changed files with a timestamp in the filename, which is good enough for me manually to grab a few files when I'm in a pinch and the Windows System is down. I also have a python script somewhere (downloaded from github) that would keep only the latest timestamp of each file and then remove the timestamp from the filename, so kind of like restoring the last backup in full or from a folder. And I could in reasonable time rewrite that to get out a specific timestamp etc, without needing to read the database and metadata files. I'm not planing to do that as the default restore method, but I'm confident to always be able to get all data I need out of the backup without _ANY_ client software. You can restore to any Windows instance, so to a fresh install, another computer etc.