File History not backing up OneDrive Documents folder (but correctly backing up other OneDrive folders)

R

RichardG_2010

I have my Documents folder and all my photos located in my OneDrive, so that they are always backed up to the cloud. I have previously successfully also used File History to back up all my user files and libraries (including the OneDrive folder) to a local external drive and it has worked fine for many years. However, recently I noticed that there is something strange happening with the Documents subfolder in the OneDrive folder of the File History backup when I went to restore a previous version of a file in OneDrive\Documents and the 'Restore personal files' view showed only a small number of files and folders, not the whole of the current contents of the OneDrive\Documents folder. Moreover, instead of the most recent automatic backup date showing (effectively) the current state of the OneDrive\Documents folder, it only showed files that had been modified since the previous automatic backup date. If I manually went backwards in time through the backups, I could see other files in my OneDrive\Documents folder that had been modified previously and were still currently in that folder, but for some reason were not showing in the 'Restore personal files' view of the most recent backup.


I thought something must have gotten out of sync with the File History database, so I stopped the file history service, deleted the %UserProfile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\FileHistory folder, deleted the File History backup folder from the external drive and then rebooted the PC. As expected after rebooting and going into Control Panel -> File History it showed that File History was off and there was no File History drive set. I then created a new File History backup to the external drive and checked that there were no 'excluded folders' set. Absolutely everything else got backed up correctly in the new backup, except for just the OneDrive\Documents folder, which wasn't created at all in the new backup. For example, my OneDrive\Pictures folder backup correctly had all 22.3GB of data comprising 13,067 files and 255 folders, exactly as expected.


I then modified a test file in my OneDrive\Documents folder, clicked on 'Run Now' in File History and then checked the backup. There was now a Documents folder showing in the OneDrive folder, but it contained just that one test file I had modified.


I tried the suggestion I had seen in a previous discussion thread about this problem of manually adding the full OneDrive\Documents path to the list of backed up folders. It was already there in the list, but I tried adding it anyway. It made no difference and the folder is still not being backed up.


Why isn't File History backing up all of the folders in OneDrive and selectively refusing to back up just the Documents folder?

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