Disable File History Backup in Windows 10 with REGEDIT or GPEDIT

 File History is a powerful tool developed by Microsoft that automatically saves user's data to an external drive. To use this tool, you just need to connect an external hard drive to your computer, add it to File History and turn on File History. and it will start copying the entire data on your computer to the external drive automatically. You can easily enable and disable this tool from Control Panel. What if you want to disable this tool permanently? In this article, we will show you how to permanently disable file history in Windows 10.

How to permanently disable file history backup in Windows 10

If you want to permanently disable file history in Windows 10, you need to change the group policy and registry settings. We will describe the following methods one by one:

1. Using the Local Group Policy Editor.
2. Using Registry Editor.

1] Using the Local Group Policy Editor

Windows 10 Home users can skip this method as Windows 10 Home Edition does not include Local Group Policy Editor.

First, launch the Run dialog box by pressing Win + R keys , then gpedit.msctype . After that, press Enter.

Now you need to navigate to the following path in the Local Group Policy Editor:

Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\File History

In the left pane, select File History. On the right side you will see a setting called Disable File History . Double click on it and a new window will open.

In the Disable File History window , select Enabled by clicking the radio button next to it. Then click Apply and then OK to save the changes you made.

This will permanently disable File History and no user will be able to use this feature from Control Panel. If the changes do not take effect on your system, restart it.

To undo the changes, repeat the above procedure again and select Disabled or Not Configured in the Disable File History window.

2] Using Registry Editor

Let's see how to disable file history in Windows 10 using the registry editor. Before proceeding, it is recommended to back up the registry to a hard drive. This way you can restore the registry if a problem occurs.

Carry out the following steps:

Launch the Run dialog box and type regedit. After that, click OK. In the UAC window, click Yes.

In the registry editor you need to go to the following path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows

Now expand Windows key and check if it contains FileHistory subkey or not. If not, create it. To do this, right-click the Windows key and choose New > Key . This creates a new subkey with a default name. You need to change the name to FileHistory.

Select the FileHistory subkey and go to ' New > DWORD (32-bit value) ' by right-clicking on the right side. Name this newly created value as Disabled .

Now double click on the Disabled value and change its value data from 0 to 1. After that click OK to save the changes made.

This will permanently disable the FileHistory option. You can check it in Control Panel. If you don't see any changes, restart your computer.

If you want to use File History, you need to turn it back on. To do this, you can either delete the Disabled value or change its value data from 1 to 0 in the registry editor.

Hope that helps.