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I've noticed that with Time Machine, it keeps an organized set of files and doesn't take up a whole lot of space. You can also recover an entire system without it being a system image that's not accessible until it's fully recovered. Almost like rsync with the ability to go back in time and grab a different version of a file.

However, with Windows 10 - I've tried File History and it has taken an unchanged file that 6gigs and copied it five times so far. So now I have 24 gigs of nonsense filling a backup drive. I've made system image backups, but I thought the main purpose of File History was to be like Time Machine, with the ability to go back and grab a previous version of a file (or one that no longer exists.)

My biggest issue with this is that it also seems like the entire PC isn't being backed up unless you create an image. It's limited to a users library. I simply want a File History of C: that allows me to recoved the entire PC - and, if C: is 150gigs the backup shouldn't go from 150gigs to 300gigs to 450gigs, each time.

Any suggestions? Am I doing something wrong? Do I need software to do this properly? As mostly a Windows user, this seems like something that Macs have done much better considering that if someone used File History, they would never be able to recover their entire computer.

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    That's why there are so many 3rd party backup apps for Windows, & almost none for Mac ;)
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Oct 11, 2016 at 16:08
  • File History indeed does make multiple copies of large unmodified files. Mac OS X uses hard links to resolve this, IDK what MS engineers smoked when they forgot that. And system image – yes, File History cannot make it. It doesn't even use shadow copies so it's principally not able to copy open&system files. However Windows 10 includes "Windows 7 Backup", which can do periodic system image and backups, but it's slow and has huge performance impact (I barely can use the system when it makes the copy, which takes 2-3 hours), and because of this it runs once a week by default (configurable)
    – LogicDaemon
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 9:56
  • Rather than adding that as an edit, put the relevant information in an Answer below, then mark it as the answer so that others with the same or similar questions can clearly see that your particular problem has been solved, and how it was solved.
    – music2myear
    Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 20:12

1 Answer 1

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Veeam is the software solution I was looking for. It's very much like Time Machine, and each backup will only account for the changes made since the last. There is also a CLI version for Linux.

  • Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows FREE
  • Veeam Agent for Linux FREE

The two Veeam Agents I'm using above can be downloaded at: https://www.veeam.com/downloads.html

(Thanks to @music2myear for the advice above, about posting the answer myself.)

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