Win 10 File History "No Usable Drives Found", not able to select the Internal drive for File History.

Hi,

Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Community.

I understand your concern, and we in Community will try to help you in the best possible way we can.

This issue might occur due to incompatible or outdated drivers.

I suggest you to go to the manufacturer’s website and check for any updated drivers available there. If so, try to install them and check if it fix the issue.

If no updated drivers available then try installing the available drivers i.e. Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 drivers in compatibility mode.

Follow the steps below on how to install driver in compatibility mode:

    1. Download the driver from the manufacturer’s website and save it on your local disk.
    2. Right click on the setup file of the driver and select “Properties”.
    3. Select “Compatibility” Tab.
    4. Place a check mark next to “Run this program in Compatibility mode” and select operating system from the drop down list.
    5. Let the driver install and then check the functionality.

Hope the information helps, if you have any further queries, feel free to post. We are here to assist you.

Regards, 

Guru Kiran

Thanks Kiran, will give it a shot.

Regards,

Ron

Hi Kiran,

No joy. The hard drive driver is up to date.

I saw someone mention in a post online that there is a bug in File History that doesn't allow it to work with a Home Group network. Is this true?

I tried creating a shared folder on the drive I wish to use and use it as a network folder, but that didn't work either.

This is very disappointing so far.

Regards,

Ron

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

Even if the driver is corrupted you might face such kind of issue.

Try to un-install and re-install the driver from device manager and check if it helps.

- To open device manager, press Windows key + X.

- Search for the driver, right click and uninstall.

- Restart your PC, restarting your PC will automatically reinstall the driver.

Regards,

Guru Kiran

Taking every step given here, made no difference. Researched elsewhere also with no success.

Windows would not "find" the drive for file history using the Windows 10 Settings interface. However, I stumbled upon the legacy interface in the Control Panel: Backup and Restore (Windows 7) while preparing a system repair disk. I clicked on file history and Windows found my internal backup drive.

Now file history is running.

In the meantime, I reinstalled AutoVer, the freeware program that does file versioning. I have used this program for years. It has saved the day many times, particularly with AutoCAD which has been prone to saving corrupted files.

Thanks for the counsel here!

Happy New Year,

Ron

I've solved this problem, for me anyway. You do have to be able to use the network share trick, tho. But it may be possible if you can get it to work with an external drive first, instead. I haven't tried. Also probably a good idea to start with a blank drive just to make sure you don't have anything in use hiding on it. I'm backing up to a pair of 1 TB drives in RAID-1. Here's what I did... after trying every single suggestion I found over the past few hours (MS suggestions were especially useless):

Create a restore point. If anything goes wrong, you will probably need to restore. Apparently once File History stops cooperating it stays that way.

Set up a network share for the target drive's ROOT (D:\ in my case).

Add that share in File History.

Let it start backing up a little bit. It will create its own file structure.

In Settings (gear icon), not via Control Panel, select More Options.

In the list of backed up folders, check if it's trying to back up anything FROM the desired target drive. Mine was trying to back up all of D:\ ! This naturally creates a conflict but you can't resolve it unless File History is already working first.

If found, remove them.

Now go back through the Control Panel backup settings, File History, and Add Drive. At this point, my physical drive finally appeared. Select it and let it move the files over. It then will start backing up as desired.

BOOM!

You can now go back and delete the folder it created for the network share (it was my username). \FileHistory is what it's using now. You can still use the drive for other data. It does not need to be dedicated to File History. This is what worked for me. I hope it works for someone else.