Cannot reassociate Windows 8 File History data between two computers

I had a UEFI Bios failure on my PC – Thanks apparently to a combination of Dell & Microsoft Updates and had to reload Windows from scratch. When I tried to re-associate File History, all I got was “Could not Re-associate File History – Access is denied”. After searching, and seeing these posts, I did the following.

First of all I tried the steps recommended above by John Thurlow. Thanks John.

Unfortunately this didn’t seem to work – although logic says it should.

I then did the following – All I can say is that this worked for me.

1.       Go to the Drive (mine was external) and rename File History to File History.original

2.       Go to Control Panel – File History

3.       Select ‘Turn On File History’ on the same Drive to create a new File History folder

4.     Immediately Stop the new backup which begins

5.       Turn Off File History

6.        Rename all the Configuration Data in the new File History to .old

 e.g. in E:\FileHistory\Paul\OFFICE-PC\Configuration\config1.xml.old
7.       Move all the File History.original  Data and Configuration files into the File History folder. The paths should look something like this:
E:\FileHistoryold\Paul\OFFICE-PC\Configuration goes to E:\FileHistory\Paul\OFFICE-PC\Configuration
 E:\FileHistoryold\Paul\OFFICE-PC\Data goes to E:\FileHistory\Paul\OFFICE-PC\Data

8.       Turn on File History from the Control Panel

This worked and I was able to restore all my files.

Not only that, but the Restore only restored ONE set of files, not the 9 different versions I had, that so many people have had difficulty with.

I am not really a techie, but I assume the .XML Config and Catalog data are just lookup tables. So once the association has been established by creating a new File History, as the path to the folders are the same, its just a case of looking up and pointing to the data.

Anyway, I hope this helps all out there who have had the same issue