Your Windows backup may have stopped four days ago without saying so

File History is the backup most people forget they switched on. You plug in an external drive once, tick a box, and from then on Windows quietly copies your Documents, Pictures and Desktop across. On a good number of PCs it stopped doing that this week, and it did not tell anybody.

Reports started on 9 September, the day after KB5124008 installed, and they say the same thing on Microsoft's own Q&A site and its community forum. The drive is plugged in. File Explorer can see it. File History insists you need to reconnect a drive. Some people get error 0x8007000E when they try to switch it back on. Others find the "Last backup" time simply frozen on a date from last week while nothing new is copied. One user reported it on three computers at once. Somebody else went digging in Event Viewer and found FileHistory.exe crashing with a .NET fault inside a component called fhuxadapter, which points at the front end falling over rather than the backup engine itself.

Microsoft has not put this one on the record. The September known issues list for Windows 11 covers USB audio, Remote Desktop and Hyper-V folder shares, and File History is nowhere on it. Windows 10 machines on the ESU updates are turning up in the same threads. Uninstalling KB5124008 does restore it, and it is still a bad trade, because that update carries this month's 966 security fixes including two Windows holes already being used in attacks.

The uncomfortable part is that a backup which fails silently is not really a backup. Go and look at the "Last backup" date on your own machine rather than assuming. If it has stopped, Tendvane's one-click backup of Documents, Pictures and Desktop will copy them to that same external drive today, instead of waiting for Microsoft to notice.