It's time for Fun With Windows Backup, a game we play to try to get the built-in Windows backup (Time Machine type backup system) to work as we want it to.
Here's the problem for today's show: I just moved to a more spacious boot drive by cloning from my previous boot drive to my new one. I noticed now about a week later that my Windows Backup volume is suddenly a lot larger than it should be. Now when I go to manage the backup, I see that a major issue is that the "Other Files" category is taking up 500GBs. That's not a good thing. I tried various remedies like selecting "Keep only the latest system image" instead of the default that allowed for more of them to build up, and that did help a bit but did nothing to change the space taken up by "Other Files."
Here's what I'm pretty sure happened. I think that when I cloned my drive this most recent time (I've cloned my boot drive in the past but that was before I was using Windows Backup), Windows did a whole new system image and then archived the old system image in "Other Files" since it was no longer current. Either that or it's found a lot of "Other Files" to backup, which are comprised of who knows what. I saw
this help thread that deals with the subject but the only advice it gives to really cut "Other Files" is to restore the backup to another drive and then trim it. That sucks.
I thought Windows backup would be a bit of an improvement over Time Machine because there are ostensibly more control panel options to control how it runs. But it turns out that that despite appearances Time Machine is superior because with Time Machine, at least I can go into the Time Machine Drive, see all the backup files directly and delete the ones I don't need. With Windows Backup I can go into the WindowsImageBackup folder and see the backup images, but they're archived instead of having the actual files exposed.
So does anyone know of another way to access these "Other Files" so that they can be trimmed, or is Windows Backup really that limited? I thought a 3TB backup drive would last me a while, but if I can't control what's backed up it's a lot harder to have an effective backup solution. If I can't find a way to manage these files I'll have to look to third party solutions.