I have a number of desktops, servers & other systems that I run & maintain – for myself, family & friends/colleagues.
I’ve slowly over the years been inching/trial&erroring towards something that resembles a best-practice setup, often just taking care of things rather than educating folks, wearing and cleaning up the resulting mess, but I have to admit, over the last number of releases, Windows really has become an exceptional experience, overall.
My environment is a BIG mix, but can be described in broad-strokes:
- Linux/UNIX baremetal, VM’s & containers – NAS, gateway, IoT, etc
- NAS’s run RAID-5 ZFS/btrfs, with daily snapshots & incremental encrypted off-site/cloud backups
- Windows’ native ‘File History’ functionality integrates seamlessly into this , so anyone can do a ‘Restore previous version’ with no intervention on my part 🙂
- NAS’s run RAID-5 ZFS/btrfs, with daily snapshots & incremental encrypted off-site/cloud backups
- ~80% of desktops are Windows-based
- all W10 (home & pro)
- & 1x W11 I’m dogfooding to test before deployment
- Various mobile devices & tablets (primarily Androids)
- Hooked into live/o365/hello/OneDrive, so Preferences & Settings (mostly) syncs across desktops OK (with caveats), and online backups/copies Desktops & Documents are sync’d.
- Settings & Preferences don’t always sync properly, so the suitability of this mechanism/approach is in question
- Anything else is simply too big or I’m not comfortable stashing in an arbitrary folder online, such as confidential data & media. This is handled on my “local cloud”
- Various OneDrive data – private, personal, shared, org, etc – is backed by the NAS, pulling data from various clouds (including GDrive) by using something like rclone, rather than backing multiple and duplicate or conflicting copies of the same data from every desktop instance, so all OneDrive/GDrive paths need to be excluded from ‘File History’
Overall this strategy has worked OK, but usability has been… shall we say… less than ideal.
- It’s not exactly intuitive, i.e. what gets backed up, what gets excluded, and what are the results
- Yes, yes I know where to find some of those values/settings, but it’s not streamlined very well, i.e. in disparate places & configs, and a lot of stitches are dropped due to lack of visibility or means for oversight
- By ‘default’, I back up %HOMEPATH%, so that I can quickly rebuild a setup when I nuke it.
- The reasoning is that this is analogous to POSIX /home, where you can essentially reconstitute your desktop form a thin rebuild/re-provisioning. (Roaming profiles)
- Some data – such as profile information (settings, configs, etc) – is resides in %HOMEPATH%Appdata, so I need to include some of that in my backup set(s), but ‘File History’ does not seem to respect this inclusion.
- From what I can gather, the action by ‘File History’ is to automatically back up libraries, irrespective of what’s linked inside, so I’ve tried to address backups by creating a “BackThisUp” library, and linking dirs/folders I want to back up using the Explorer “Include in library” context menu. Not ideal, but provides a degree of control.
Nowhere is there really sufficient controls over this, similar to the legacy “Back up and Restore (Windows 7)” mechanism for pre-selecting/deselecting suggested defaults, or the ability to easily/intuitively change that, so overall one’s flying a little blind.
Unfortunately much of this (quite limited) UX has been kneecapped in W11!
W11 no longer has the Settings[âš™] backup mechanism, meaning that the little control there was over backups has been removed, and for no apparent reason I can see!
I’ve had some success having a crack at %LOCALAPPDATA%MicrosoftWindowsFileHistoryConfigurationConfig[12].xml , but information on this is sparse and there don’t seem to be tools available to do an adequate job of tweaking this, and this is honestly not something that resembles a solution.
Overall this might not be such a significant issue if there were other MS-native tools available to meet the same need, such as MMC plugins, or as an ‘Optional Feature’.
I’ve found WinGet & making use of Windows Admin Server (WAC) – what a find! – but those don’t have native backup tools or functionality to achieve this goal.
Windows Server Backup (WSB) does seem like the better solution here, but from what I can tell it’s not available on desktop platforms or as in installable binary.
The closest I could find was ‘Paragon Backup & Recovery CE‘ which allows me to make selective incremental snapshot backups at or close to filesystem-level, to a VHD on a network target of my choice, which is almost perfect!
I appreciate that this is probably that’s edging into AD/GPO territory, but it’s really not a suitable solution for n<25 end-points, most of whom are not under my control, such as spouse/partner’s work-machine(s) or other WfH asking for help.
Q’s:
- What is a better solution or approach for managing backups?
- Are there any MS-native tools I’m unaware of to better manage this?
- Is there an approach I’m ignorant of?
Any feedback, insight or guidance re this would be appreciated
