I’ve always liked “Time Machine” in Mac OS X and how it effortlessly backs up Mac systems and makes it a breeze to recover earlier versions of files. I delete something, I can recover it, without much thought. Now Windows 8 apparently has a similar feature called “Windows File History”, but I can’t figure out how to enable it. Help!
We’ve been using Time Machine on our Mac systems for years and have a multi-terabyte backup system that’s full of file versions and backups. Recovering content, however, isn’t quite as easy as you say, because of the weird “space” interface Apple created for the system. But that’s another story, one for another post.
You’re right that one of the smart additions to Windows 8 is what Microsoft calls Windows File History. In a nutshell, give it a remote drive (networked or directly plugged in) and it’ll keep making backup “versions” of your files each time they change or update, allowing you to recover copies that are a day, a week, or even a few months old.
Decide in a fit of zeal to delete your novel and start over? Microsoft’s now got ya covered when you come back to your senses and want to recover the 35,000 words you’ve already written, for example. 🙂
What’s really nice is that since it’s keeping track of content, opening up the file and deleting its contents counts as a version increment, so even though you haven’t deleted the file, you can still back up and recover the earlier version (by comparison, a file recovery utility only recovers deleted files, not earlier versions of files that haven’t been axed)
Having sung its praises, like Time Machine on the Mac, Windows File History isn’t very well designed or integrated into the system, so it’s a bit of a chore to get it configured and running. But let’s have a look.
Start out by bringing up the Charms bar and clicking (or tapping, though I’ll just say “clicking” throughout) on the Settings icon. A bunch of options appear:
Click on “Control Panels” and, just like in Windows 7, you’ll see a familiar screen full of options:
Look closely under “System and Security” and the second option should sound promising: Save backup copies of your files with File History. It is. Click on it.
As you can see, I’ve already plugged in a second drive (D:) with plenty of space free for backups, etc. If you don’t have an external drive — and you could ostensibly use a USB flash drive for this, though you really want it available as much as possible — you won’t be able to proceed from this point. If you do, however, as I have, click on “Turn on” on the lower right to enable Windows File History.
Now it’s time to be social, even if you don’t actually have a network and other users:
If you want, you can click “Yes” to recommend others use the same drive for their File History, or just click “No” to proceed.
You’re now up and running:
As you’d expect, it’ll take a while for Windows File History to catch up with what you’re doing, and note the list of options on the left, especially Exclude folders, which might be necessary if there are folders of content you don’t want to track with versions, temp files you just don’t care about or Web related content, drafts of videos that will be huge, or similar.
Otherwise, you’re good to go. And I’ll be posting a tutorial shortly about how to work with Windows File History, so stay tuned for that too!