File History on SMB Network Drive Cannot Be Enabled

[maplepants]

I'm trying to do File History on an SMB share, and I keep getting the error message "Could not enable File History - The system cannot find the file specified" when I select my share location.

I've tried it with the network location mapped to a drive letter, as well as mapped to a "network location" (the later is what you can see in the screenshot).

 

Does anyone have experience doing this? It's been many years since I did anything but game under Windows so my debugging chops are not good and I could be missing something obvious.

 

Windows client: Windows 11, connected via LAN

Share host: M1 Mac mini, connected via LAN.

 

The Windows PC can access the share generally, the credentials are saved in the keychain (or whatever Windows calls it). I can read and write on the share to my heart's content, File History is the only thing I've used so far that doesn't like it.

[GoodBytes]

Funny, I have the same problem. I thought it was the recent Insider build the issue, as I am under it.

 

I didn't have time to investigate it, thaugh.

[maplepants]

32 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

I thought it was the recent Insider build the issue, as I am under it.

I'm on the latest public stable release 21H2 - 22000.675

 

44 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

I didn't have time to investigate it, thaugh.

In case you do, I'll give you what I've got because it can't hurt. Lots of articles still talk about Windows 10, and based on the screenshots, the settings menus are all gone in Windows 11.

 

Looks like the only way to access File History is via control panel. 

 

Maybe there's something like Console.app or /var/log on Windows, but I cannot find it. I'd imagine if there were though, it'd have an error code that google could do more with.

[GoodBytes]

It looks like Microsoft is silently killing File History under Windows 11.

I noticed that no entry exist under Windows 11 latest build for it.

[maplepants]

35 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

It looks like Microsoft is silently killing File History under Windows 11.

I noticed that no entry exist under Windows 11 latest build for it.

This is what I was most afraid of. Which is quite sad, since File History is an excellent product that's really unmatched by third party software. Stuff like duplicatti or restic offer a lot of the same versioning benefits, but nothing is as easy as File History. 

 

I used it on my previous Windows 10 PC, and it's one of those "it just works" computer features that I really relied on.

 

I currently have a USB drive hanging off the back of my machine to handle File History, but I'm really hoping to move this to my network share so that I can use that drive for something else.

[GoodBytes]

2 hours ago, maplepants said:

This is what I was most afraid of. Which is quite sad, since File History is an excellent product that's really unmatched by third party software. Stuff like duplicatti or restic offer a lot of the same versioning benefits, but nothing is as easy as File History. 

 

I used it on my previous Windows 10 PC, and it's one of those "it just works" computer features that I really relied on.

 

I currently have a USB drive hanging off the back of my machine to handle File History, but I'm really hoping to move this to my network share so that I can use that drive for something else.

I fully agree. I checked quickly online, and I can't easily find a replacement.

All there is now is OneDrive sync.... which I guess is fine as it does the same, and even under the free plan (assuming you don't have Office/Microsoft 365) is plenty for documents. for most people. But still.. well, it's online, and that assume you trust Microsoft. And if you have a project in there, there is lot of syncing going on.

 

[maplepants]

6 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

I fully agree. I checked quickly online, and I can't easily find a replacement.

All there is now is OneDrive sync.... which I guess is fine as it does the same, and even under the free plan (assuming you don't have Office/Microsoft 365) is plenty for documents. for most people. But still.. well, it's online, and that assume you trust Microsoft. And if you have a project in there, there is lot of syncing going on.

 

I've started a trial for Genie Timeline 10. It's ugly as sin, but setup was easy enough and the timeline feature is as close as I've seen to File History. If it ends up being good enough to buy, that'll probably hold me over enough to ditch my File History drive and move that on to its next job.

 

The OneDrive option looks okay, but I've got 10GB I need to backup and there's just no way I'm paying for OneDrive. I already have 2TB on iCloud, and 100GB on Google Drive, buying a third cloud storage service would really be a bad sign.