Windows 10 backing up to an external hard drive

scruffyone

Been backing up to an external drive of each month. At the beginning of March is was not successful. Message on 'back up and restore files Windows 7' - showed a red bar with 'check your backup the last one was not completed satisfactorily. Have tried but don't know what to do. Help!

I will answer any questions as long as they are not too technical.

Neil_Jones

Normally Backup doesn't complete because the drive you're backing up is out of space.

scruffyone

Thanks for the reply, when this has happened in the past a notice comes up telling me that the disk is full. The disk is not full This didn't happen this time just a 'red bar' came up. I tried to change the settings and the back up disk but this didn't work either. :mad: not mad with you!!



Any other ideas please.?

Frozen_up_north

I don’t know how reliable Windows backup is. Personally I favour Acronis, although it’s not free. I do full backups too, as incremental ones can rely on all the previous ones being sound.

https://www.acronis.com/

that

give us a clue...

Is it windows backup, rather than 3rd party s/w?

if the backup takes 30 mins does the problem happen within 2 mins or 29 mins?

You have run it as an administrator?

There is only 1 drive, and you have run
chkdsk /f /r

scruffyone

Thank you Frozen Up North I will check this out.


That - to be honest I can't tell you as I plug in do the necessary and then go and get on with something else. Not very patient me!!! Is this critical?

Raxiel

I'll give another vote for Acronis. You can buy a one off perpetual licence, although I pay a cloud subscription as well (although I'll have to re-visit that in the summer since my 'unlimited' deal will be coming to an end in October).


I have it set for daily incremental backups. Aside from pulling back the odd file deleted by accident, I've only had to perform a full restore from backup once, but when I did it worked flawlessly and quickly.

AndyPix

Yeah Acronis is great .. But windows backup is simplicity its self to use ..
If the OP is struggling with that then I doubt they will be any better with Acronis ..


OP theres not enough info for anyone to help you

DoaM

Where is Windows Backup backing up TO?

When it runs, does it make a backup file on the host machine and THEN copy it to a removable drive?

Which drive is showing as full? The host ( C ) drive or the backup location?

(Never used Windows backup so don't know how it operates).

Raxiel

AndyPix wrote: »

Yeah Acronis is great .. But windows backup is simplicity its self to use ..
If the OP is struggling with that then I doubt they will be any better with Acronis ..


OP theres not enough info for anyone to help you

I disagree, It's simple to start, but it's not very good at telling you what its doing, or how long its going to be, and incremental backups are (in my experience) hit and miss. It was inexplicable failures like the one described in the OP that lead me to put my hand in my pocket and pay for a backup solution that was being actively developed in the first place.