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I'm setting up a backup solution on a sibling's home computer. I have an external hard drive for backup roughly 300GB in size. I am backing up no more than 75GB of pictures and miscellaneous documents. Will the File History included in Windows 10 protect him against primary drive failure? Related, would File History protect if he had a larger back up drive?

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Windows File History is useful for restoring to an older version of a file; e.g. a Word document that was messed up in editing. However,

  1. It may make multiple backups of unchanged files, which could fill the drive.

  2. It may miss files that are not in defined Libraries.

The best protection against primary drive failure is to make an image of the whole drive, perhaps on a monthly schedule (deleting images older than two or three months), to an external HDD or to the cloud (slow!). That way, the OS as well as personal files can be restored in the event of a disaster, whether hard drive failure or malware such as CryptoLocker. For security, the external drive should be removed when not imaging.

In addition, schedule regular backup of personal files, perhaps daily or weekly.

There are a number of free (as well as paid) imaging and backup programs such as Aomei Backupper, Macrium Reflect Free and DriveImage XML. Some of these can schedule backup and imaging, though I'd caution the user to avoid using machine during those processes.

BTW, if there are many video or graphic files, a larger external HDD is in order. A WD 3 TB drive, ten times the size of your suggested drive, is ~US$110, and others might be less.

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Just like Windows 7's Backup and Restore, File History will back up the user's personal folders, and allows earlier versions of files to be viewed more easily. And, like Windows 7, the user can also create a separate Windows Image Backup of the main drive. If the main drive fails it's possible to restore that image to a new drive under -certain conditions- (must be same size or larger, etc.) For best protection against catastrophic hard drive failure, however, it's better to create a Recovery Boot drive on a USB thumb drive of at least 32 gig. Using the checkbox, make sure to tell the utility to copy the original factory recovery partition to the thumb drive, which could then be restored to a new, bare metal drive.

A 300 gig external drive can easily handle 75gigs of data, plus allowing one to save the separate Windows Image Backup on that drive.

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