Where is Windows Backup in Windows 8?

When you are new to Windows 8 and looking for the Windows backup tool you might be looking for a while. The built-in tool to backup your files is now called ‘File History’. You can find it in the ‘System and Security’ part of the Control Panel.

(Since we used a virtual machine I added the local drive as network share to test this functionality, this is ofcourse the wrong way of making a proper backup).

When you plug in an USB device and turn on File History, Windows will automatically cache your files on this drive. You can exclude folders by clicking ‘exclude folders’ in the left part of the screen.

Using File History is perfect to recover deleted or editted files, but maybe not the best tool to backup large folders and files like picture collections, movies and software. There are different ways to backup these files, you can do this online with an online backup tool. Or you can use a locally installed backup tool to backup your files to an external drive.

Please note that we installed the Consumer Preview of Windows 8, since Windows 8 is still in pre-production, the actual features of the File History tool might be subject to change.