Secret Tips For… File History
Select files to back up, change how often File History runs and restore old versions of your Onedrive and Google Drive documents
Switch on File History
Windows File History lets you manage which of your files are backed up automatically so you can restore old versions if you need them. To switch it on you’ll need to connect an external drive or large (64GB+) USB stick to your PC. Once that’s done, click Start, type control panel, press Enter, then click ‘System and Security’ followed by File History. Click the ‘Turn on’ button (at the bottom right, below where your external drive is listed).
File History will now start backing up your personal files (such as your documents, downloads, music, photos and videos). While this is processing you’ll see a ‘File History is saving copies of your files for the first time’ message (see screenshot below). When this disappears the backup process is complete.
From now on, you can restore earlier versions of any file you edit by rightclicking it, then clicking ‘Restore previous versions’. Select the version you want to restore, then click Restore.
Change how often files are backed up
To change how frequently File History backs up your files, click ‘Advanced settings’, then click the ‘Save copies of files’ dropdown menu and choose an interval that suits you. You can also manually start a backup by clicking ‘Run now’.
Keep File History at a manageable size
If in the previous tip you set an interval of 10 minutes, for example, File History could create a lot of file versions and your external drive/usb stick could run out of space very quickly. To restrict the number of file versions saved on your drive, return to the File History menu. Click ‘Advance settings’, then the ‘Keep saved versions’ dropdown menu to select a time period (after which versions will be deleted).
We suggest one month to keep the number of versions stored to a minimum. If you want to remove old versions manually, click ‘Clean up versions’, choose a time period from the dropdown menu, then click Clean up (see screenshot above).
Exclude folders containing files you never change
File History is most useful for files you regularly edit – documents, spreadsheets and photos, for example. To stop File History wasting your PC’S resources backing up files you’re less likely to change – such as videos and music – you can make File History ignore them.
Before you start excluding folders it’s a good idea to find out exactly which folders File History is currently backing up. To do this, click the Start button, type backup, then press Enter. When the Backup window opens, click ‘More options’. Scroll down to the ‘Back up these folders’ section to see exactly what is being backed up.
To exclude a folder in the list, click it, then click Remove. You may see several entries relating to Onedrive. You don’t need to save File History for Onedrive because it does this all by itself. To remove these Onedrive backups in File History, scroll down to the ‘Exclude these folders’ section. Click ‘Add a folder’, navigate to the Onedrive folder, then click ‘Choose this folder’.