When my wife's laptop updated win 7 to 10, some years ago, I was suspicious of File History backup and carried on using thw win 7 backup. But after researching it, I changed over, using a USB3 drive, and it's works well. I ran both for a while. She could display all past versions of a file in file manager, and restore any one of them.

But it's intended to work continuously in the background, with the backup drive always available, and I wanted the backup disconnected to avoid ransomeware. So I put a shortcut on the desktop to start it up manually.

I never had to restore the whole drive so I can't comment on that.

Technically, what it does is make a copy of the directory structure (like Linux rsync) and simply adds a timestamp to each filename. That's what you see if you mount the backup drive.

As I posted on this thread recently, she's now using Linux. No more Windows Update! But I miss file history backup.