File History drive may become disconnected
Always keeping your data backed up and updated is a crucial routine. Thanks to the File History, you can easily create backups for your files in Windows 8/8.1/10. Sometimes, you may find out that your File History Drive was disconnected. The specific error message may vary.
“Reconnect your drive. Your File History drive was disconnected for too long. Reconnect it and then tap or click to keep saving copies of your files.”
“Your files will be temporarily copied to your hard drive until you reconnect your File History drive and run a backup”
When a scheduled backup task is triggered, it will prompt with such an error. By default, File History will save copies of files every hour, so it may be quite annoying if you do not fix it, not to mention that your files are not protected.
Why is File History drive disconnected?
If your external hard drive is indeed disconnected and you do not want to backup your files anymore, you can just turn off File History.
If you still get this error when your backup disk is well connected, then it means there is a problem with your disk or file system. Sometimes, File History cannot recognize your drive.
If you can open and view the File History drive in File Explorer in Windows 8/10, then the backup drive may be failing or file system corrupted.
If you have also connected this drive to another computer for backup, another user may have restricted your permission to access this drive.
Solutions to File History drive disconnected
Check and fix hard drive errors
If you doubt there might be some errors on your hard drive, then you can first check your hard drive for bad sectors.
1. In Windows 10, right-click on the Start menu and choose Command Prompt (Admin). In Windows 8/8.1, you can press Windows + R key and type in “CMD” in the Run window.
2. In the command prompt window, type in “chkdsk.exe /f H:” and press Enter. You should replace the “H” with the drive letter of your backup disk.
It will take some time to finish checking and fixing hard disk errors. If the value of the bad sector is higher than 0, then the disk is probably damaged or starting to. For your backup data’s security, you should clone the failing disk to a new one and use the cloned one as the backup drive.
If you see no bad sectors, then the problem is not with the backup disk. It might be the configuration files that cause this error.
Clean up File History configuration files
If you cannot simply reconnect your drive to File History, you can delete the configuration files and then reconnect it. This method will delete all the File History backups, so it is recommended to create another backup of your files before trying the following.
1. Make sure you are able to view hidden files. You can enable Show hidden files and folders in File Explorer Options, and also uncheck the option Hide protected operating system files.
2. navigate to the folder below and Delete all the files in it :
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\FileHistory\Configuration\
You can also type “%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\FileHistory\Configuration” in a Run window to open this folder directly.
3. Then you can go back File History and connect the drive again.
How to reconnect File History drive?
If your external hard drive used for File History backup has been disconnected for too long, you will be asked to reconnect your drive. You need to manually reconnect the drive and then start the backup as the following:
1. Navigate to Settings > Update & security > Backup.
2. Reselect the external hard drive or network drive.
You can also change another drive to save File History backup. To do that, you can click More options in File History, and scroll down to the Back up to a different drive section and click the Stop using drive button.
Create a shared folder to save File History Backup
If you only want a specific folder to save File History backup, you can create a shared folder on your external hard drive or internal drive and then use File History to backup to this folder. Some users struggle to let File History backup to the internal drive, and this workaround definitely works.
To do that, just follow these steps:
1. Create a new folder named File History Drive or whatever suits you.
2. Right-click on the newly created folder and select Properties.
3. Click on the Sharing tab and select Share... to create a shared folder. You need to add the Read/Write permission.
4. Locate and copy the shared folder’s network address. It is like //your IP address/File History Drive.
5. Open File History and click Select a network location and then click Add network location to add this shared folder as the backup location.
Use File History alternative
Due to problems that File History may cause you, File History is not ideal for file backup. In that case, you can try an free alternative to File History, AOMEI Backupper Standard. Besides file backup, it can also backup your system.
To backup files and folders with AOMEI Backupper:
1. Free download, and run this free backup software.
2. Click “Backup” tab, and choose “File Backup”.
3. In this screen, click “Add File” or “Add Folder” to include specific files and folders in the backup.
4. Choose a target location to save the image backup. Besides external hard drive, this tool allows you to backup to NAS network location and local hard drives.
5. Click “Schedule” to create a schedule to run this file backup automatically if needed. After that, click “Start Backup” to start backup your files.
If you not like image backup, AOMEI Backupper also provides File Sync feature. You can configure scheduled sync task or real-time file sync (supported by AOMEI Backupper Profeesional) for continuous data protection. If you constantly receive the error your File History drive was disconnected, you can try all these methods to fix it or use this File History alternative instead.