When File History seems to work erratically

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LANGALIST PLUS

When File History seems to work erratically

By Fred Langa File History doesn’t run on an absolute schedule; it’s designed to stay idle when your PC is busy. How to tell a transient delay from a serious problem. Plus: Avoiding conflicts when using multiple anti-malware tools, and how to convert an old-style, MBR-formatted disk to the better, newer GPT format.

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When you right click on the disk manager where the description of the drive is (left column – volume), one of the options is “convert to GPT Disk”. Once you select that, you can create the GPT partition and go from there.

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“GPT would allow that; it supports insanely huge storage spaces — up to 10 zettabytes.”

Careful there. I’m not that old and I can remember when a gigabyte drive was thought to be a pipe dream. Now I’ve got thousands of them sitting on my desktop. I can buy multi-terabyte drives with barely more than pocket change. With the intereconnectedness-of-everything approaching, I wouldn’t be surprised if within my lifetime you guys are bemoaning the lack of foresight in setting a 10 zettabyte limit.

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I ran into an interesting problem with File History and a virtual hard drive – maybe somebody can make a suggestion?
I purchased a Windows 8.1 tablet with only 16GB of memory – which in reality turned out to be about 10GB because removing the recovery partition turned the tablet into a paperweight. After doing some research, the solution was a 64GB micro-SD card with an auto-mounting virtual hard drive filling the card. (more on that)

The problem I am having with File History is it will not accept a VHD as a place to store files. My current work around is a network attached drive. Go figure. Is there perhaps a Registry hack to permit the use of the VHD? The VHD travels with the tablet, the network drive is only accessible on my LAN.

Why a VHD? Because I needed to move as much of the storage as possible from the paltry internal RAM chips to the SD card. An SD card is seen as removable storage and there are a lot of things Windows 8.1 won’t put on a removable storage device. On the other hand, Windows will happily put such things on a VHD. I was able to change the default location for installing programs, set up the Recycle Bin on the VHD and move most of my User folder to the VHD – the one exception was AppDataLocal (no problem with Local Low and Roaming). The Local folder has files that cannot be moved while Windows is running and are hard to access when Windows isn’t running, plus there are files with names longer than 256 characters.

I didn’t expect to do high-end stuff on an 8 inch Win8.1 tablet, but I can do most of the stuff I might want to do on the go, including reading eBooks, working with Office files, Outlook and Lync (the hub of my employers’ live communications). If the hotel or client site has a HDMI input display, I can switch from touch to a compact Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and have a low-end PC.

It is far from perfect (back to that File History issue), but it is a cheap, highly portable alternative to hauling around a full PC.

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