Not impressed? Well, if you create your own libraries, file versions in those locations will be backed up too, and automatically. Come on, that’s downright impressive.
By default, File History automatically backs up everything in your libraries, on your desktop, in your Favorites, and in Contacts. That’s a lot more stuff than it perhaps sounds like; remember that your libraries consist of eight locations by default: My Documents, Public Documents, My Music, Public Music, My Pictures, Public Pictures, My Videos, and Public Videos.
You can also configure File History to automatically back up other locations of your choice or, to not back up certain locations too. If you have a home network with a home server, a network attached storage (NAS) device, or a PC with lots of storage, you can even configure File History to work across the network, and then automatically recommend that location to others on the homegroup, creating a central location for all file backups.
Chapter 13 discusses homegroups, which is a networking feature that makes home-based sharing easier than ever.
To better understand File History, let’s see it in action.
Enabling and Configuring File History
File History, like Storage Spaces, is implemented as a classic control panel. So the fastest way to access its configuration interface is to use Start Search. Or, display Control Panel via the new power user menu (mouse into the lower-left corner of the screen, right-click, and select Control Panel) and then search for File History using the preselected search box.
The File History control panel is shown in Figure 11-14. As you can see, it’s disabled by default.
File History actually caches a subset of your file backups to your system disk. So this feature will often work just fine even when you’re away from home with a portable computer.
On a single disk PC or device, like your typical portable computer, File History will recommend using a network location.
Figure 11-14: File History is disabled by default and will recommend a network location on a single disk system.
Alternatively, you can use any other disk, including a removable, USB-based hard drive. If you have such a disk attached to the PC, File History will resemble Figure 11-15, where the other disk is preselected.
Figure 11-15: You can use secondary disks for File History as well.
To enable File History, simply click the Turn on button. However, some configuration options are available and should be considered first:
• Change drive: If you’re not happy with the drive that File History selected, click this link to select a new one. The resulting page will help you select a new disk, if one is available, or a network location.
Exclude folders: If you would like to exclude certain folder locations from being backed up, you can do so here. Remember that everything in your libraries, desktop, Favorites, and Contacts is backed up, so be sure to pick a folder inside one of those locations, since other locations are already omitted.
You can also manually run a File History backup at any time by revisiting the control panel and selecting Run now.
• Advanced settings: This important interface, shown in Figure 11-16, provides some fine-grained control over key File History functionality. You can change how often files are backed up, the size of the offline cache (which is the size of the File History backups replicated on your system disk), and the length of time to save backups. You can also use this interface to clean up (that is, delete) older backups and advertise your backup location to others on the homegroup.
Figure 11-16: Be sure to spend some time examining these options.
Once you’ve configured File History to your liking, click Save changes to return to the main File History screen and then click Turn on. File History will indicate that it is saving copies of your files for the first time, but you are free to close the window, get back to work, and do other things. You can pretty much forget about File History until you need it.
Recovering Documents and Other Data Files with File History
When the time comes to recover a lost or previous version of a file, you have two basic ways to access the new File History restore functionality. You can relaunch the File History control panel and click the Restore personal files link. Or, you can use the far more discoverable method that’s available right in File Explorer. This latter option makes more sense for two reasons. Oftentimes when you’re looking for the previous version of a file, you’re staring at that folder anyway. And when you trigger File History restore from File Explorer, it will navigate automatically to that location for you. So you won’t need to hunt around for the file.
Since the Explorer ribbon is minimized by default, you may need to expand it before you will see the History command.
Since the second method makes so much more sense, we’ll examine that. Navigating in File Explorer to the scene of the crime—a folder in which a file was deleted or overwritten, perhaps—you will find a History command in the Home tab, as shown in Figure 11-17.
Figure 11-17: The History command opens File History restore for the current folder.
Click History to display the File History restore interface shown in Figure 11-18.
Figure 11-18: File History’s restore interface
This window includes some interesting features. First, the current view shows the most recent file revisions, typically from the same day, and generally from a fairly recent time period. (If you left File History’s Save copies of files feature on the default setting, these versions will be less than one-hour old.) There are navigational elements similar to those in File Explorer that allow you to go Back and Forward, and up one level, and you can type an arbitrary Explorer location into the address bar if you’d like.
The Options icon (which resembles a gear) in the top right provides numerous options related to icon view styles as well as some restore links. And the Windows Media Player-like control at the bottom of the window will let you restore any selected files and folders, or all of them. Or you can click the Rewind button to see earlier versions of the backed-up files. In fact, if you keep clicking this button, you’ll travel back in time (not literally), seeing multiple revisions of frequently-accessed documents as you go.
If you find something you’d like to recover, you have two options: You can recover them directly to the same folder, overwriting whatever’s there now; or you can recover them to a different location.
