File History not detecting my data drive?

[tgp1994]

Hi everyone,

After a rather painful upgrade to Windows 10, I'm finally running on my new operating system. Something that shocked me when I was running Windows 8.1 was the fact that file history was not running. I had become so used to being automatically protected by Windows 7's equivalent that I just assumed windows 8.1 had turned it on. As it would seem, nope. So I enabled it for a network share on my NAS server while I was doing backups, then when that finished I shut down the server.

Now that I'm on Windows 10, I'd like to set the File History destination to my internal data hard drive. For some reason, File History does not list it as a usable drive. In case it may have been a space issue, I cleaned it up so now 200+GB of free space is available. Still no go. I read that creating a folder named "FileHistory" on the drive and sharing it may magically do the trick (??) but not luck there either.

Has anyone run into this problem, and can any solutions be offered?

[Geek-9pm]

You are right. It does not always work like you want.
Of a number of articles, this one looks good.

File History in Windows 8, 8.1 and 10

Windows 8/8.1 and 10 File History is a bit like Previous Versions in Windows Vista and 7, but it has to be set up and configured first. Unlike the System Restore-integrated file recovery in older Windows versions, File History keeps most backups on a separate hard drive, removable drive (external hard drive or USB stick) or network drive - only a small amount of previous versions are kept on the drive where Windows is installed.

The article goes on  to give a full tutorial with screen shots.  Your backups ought to be on a separate hard drive.

[tgp1994]

You are right. It does not always work like you want.
Of a number of articles, this one looks good.

File History in Windows 8, 8.1 and 10The article goes on  to give a full tutorial with screen shots.  Your backups ought to be on a separate hard drive.

Right, and that's why I'm confused. Going by the listed options:

File History keeps most backups on a separate hard drive, removable drive (external hard drive or USB stick) or network drive

It should be detecting at least two additional drives; I have my system SSD, a SATA HDD for storing programs and some user files, then my larger SATA HDD for storing backups. I'm not sure how much the article can help me at this point - I'm pretty familiar with setting up File History by now, and I'm fairly certain that my larger HDD (which I refer to as my data drive, sorry if that was confusing) would be available.