BUILD YOUR OWN TIME MACHINE
Hassle-free backup just like Apple’s
We all know how important it is to keep our data backed up. If Windows stops working, you can reinstall it; if your laptop dies, you can buy another one. But if you don’t have a spare copy of your spreadsheets, or your holiday photos, or the video of that overambitious music concert you once put on in the upstairs room of your local pub, then you’re courting disaster. If those things get lost, no one can recover them for you.
The trouble is, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about backup. When you think about protecting your files, there’s a good chance you picture cumbersome third-party software and tedious evenings spent burning DVD-Rs. Or perhaps you’re thinking of hours spent online, uploading gigabytes of data to the cloud that will – touch wood – never be downloaded again, and paying hefty monthly fees for the privilege.
In an ideal world, backing up would be completely effortless. It would run silently in the background with no action required on your part, and it wouldn’t cost a penny. The good news is that such a backup system actually exists – and if you’re running Windows 8 or 10, you already have it.
Talking Time Machine
Credit where it’s due: the sort of backup we’re talking about was pioneered by Apple back in 2007, in a macOS feature called Time Machine. Mac users simply need to flick a switch to enable Time Machine and select a backup destination, and their files are protected. Time Machine also introduced a slick new approach to restoring lost or overwritten files: rather than having to rummage through your backup archives, it presents a graphical view of your folders as they were on any given date in the past, and lets you step forwards and backwards through time until you find what you want.
Apple made a big noise about Time Machine when it was introduced, and with good reason – by making backup easy enough for everyone to bother with, it represented a huge step forward for data safety. Before long, Windows users were demanding an equivalent, and in Windows 8 Microsoft introduced a continuous backup tool called File History that just happened to work a lot like Time Machine. In fact, perhaps the biggest difference was how low-key its introduction was – but Windows 8 was such a radical experiment that a new backup feature was never going to grab the headlines.
Get hip to File History
Even though Microsoft hasn’t made a song and dance about File History, it’s an excellent feature. In fact, if you’re still on Windows 7, it’s one of the better reasons to upgrade. It automatically backs up your personal files onto a USB hard disk or network share as you change them, and offers a folder-based timeline for browsing and restoring old documents.
If you have a spare USB hard disk knocking around, therefore, or space on your NAS drive, there’s almost no reason not to turn on File History. If you have a backup system already in place, consider running both in parallel: File History is very convenient, and restoring files from a local disk inside your home is likely to be quicker than downloading them from a cloud backup service.
USB or NAS?
If you’re going to try File History, you’ll need to decide where your backups will live, as there are pros and cons to both USB and NAS drives. (File History can also write backups to an internal hard disk, but we’d advise against this: if your backups are hosted on the same computer as your working data, a virus or electrical fault could take out both at once.)
Let’s look at USB first. This can be a cheap option, as you’re looking at no more than £50 for a 1TB drive, which may well cover your backup needs for many years. It’s likely to be faster than backing up over the network too, although this isn’t a huge issue: files are backed up quietly in the background, and it’s hopefully very rare that you’ll need to restore a large file from your backup archive.
One downside of USB is that backups can be saved only when the disk is physically connected to your computer, which could be inconvenient for laptop users. It’s not a disaster, though, as Windows caches any changes made while the disk is unplugged, and writes out the next time it’s available.
The USB approach also doesn’t scale well, as each PC will need its own drive. And since there’s no RAID or other data-protection feature, your backup device is itself vulnerable to a hardware failure, not to mention virus attacks.
With a NAS share as your destination, most of these considerations flip around. Your backups can be automatically updated whenever you’re connected to your home network – you don’t need to remember to plug anything in – and any number of clients can be backed up to a single appliance. NAS enclosures almost invariably use RAID, so a single disk failure won’t wipe out your backups, and this also means you can conveniently expand your storage capacity by simply replacing the disks one at a time with larger drives.
Of course, a NAS appliance is much more expensive than a USB drive. If you don’t want to make the investment, check whether your router has a USB connector that allows you to share an external hard disk over the network: this will give you many of the benefits of NAS-based backup for the price of a USB hard disk.
Using File History
It’s characteristic of Windows 10 that in the latest OS build there are two different ways to access File History. Search the Start menu for “File History” and you’ll find the original Control Panel interface, as introduced in Windows 8; search for “Backup” and
By making backup easy enough for everyone to bother with, Time Machine represented a huge step forward for data safety
you’ll be directed to the relevant page in the new Settings app.
For simplicity, we suggest you get started via the Settings app. Here, taking a leaf from Apple’s book, Microsoft gives you a single switch you can use to enable File History. It won’t be visible at first, though: you’ll need to click on “Add a drive” to set your destination. Once this is done, you can flip the switch and Windows will start working on your backup right away. It may take a few hours or even days to establish a first complete backup of your files, but in most cases you don’t need to do anything more.
If you want to customise your backup, you can do so by clicking More Options. A pretty comprehensive selection of locations is backed up by default, including your Desktop, Documents and Downloads folders, but you can add others with a few clicks. To remove a folder from the list, you can click on it to reveal a Remove button – it’s a bit stupid that this isn’t visible by default, but the interface is clearly a work in progress. It’s also possible to exclude specific subfolders from File History, but for now this has to be done from the Control Panel interface (you’ll find the Exclude Folders link at the left-hand side of the window).
You can also choose how frequently your files are backed up; if you’re paranoid, you can adjust this from the default hourly schedule to every ten minutes.
Managing space
One thing you can’t configure in File History is exactly how much space you want to allocate for backups. By default, Windows will just keep on backing up new and changed files until your chosen destination is full. You can work around this by creating a dedicated partition or network share of limited size for backups, but we’d have liked to see a bit more flexibility.
You can also indirectly limit File History’s use of space by telling it only to keep backups for a specific amount of time, with options ranging from one month to two years. This is a blunt instrument, though: you might want to keep the backed-up contents of your Desktop folder forever, say, while purging your Downloads folder every 30 days. Alas, you can only specify one retention policy for all files.
And there’s one further frustration: instead of setting File History to retain backups for a certain period of time, you can tell it to keep saved files “Until space is needed”, with the oldest backups being automatically removed to make way for new ones. Unfortunately, in the current implementation this setting doesn’t seem to work: many users have reported that when the disk is full, File History just complains that the disk is full and stops backing up.
Thankfully, it isn’t hard to clear off space manually. In the Control Panel interface, below the “Keep saved versions” dropdown menu, you’ll see a link entitled “Clean up versions”: click this and you’ll be invited to purge all backups older than a certain age, with options ranging from a month to two years. For finer control, you can also open a Command Prompt and type FHMANAGEW.EXE - CLEANUP, followed by a number: this will remove all backups more than that many days old.
If a few oversized files are eating up all your backup space, you can also find and delete them individually. Open your File History destination in Explorer and you’ll see a set of subfolders named <your name>\<your PC name>\Data, with your backed-up files within. To find all items larger
If you’ve struggled with backup discipline in the past, File History is the answer to your prayers – and it’s free
than a certain size, simply enter (for example) size:>2GB into the search field at the top right of the Explorer window. Note that archived files don’t always keep their original filenames, so you might need to open them to find out what they are. If you’re certain you don’t need a backup of a particular file, you can just delete it like any other file.
Restoring files with File History
They say that a file isn’t backed up until you’ve tested that you can recover it – so once File History has finished, the first thing you should do is to delete a file and make sure that you can bring it back. (Obviously don’t do this with anything missioncritical, just in case.)
One way to recover a backed-up file is to open the folder that used to contain it and click the History button, which you’ll find tucked away under the Home tab in the Windows 10 Explorer. This opens a new window showing the contents of the folder as it was on a specific date, with the date of the snapshot above and a couple of controls at the bottom. Towards the bottom right you’ll also see two buttons that let you switch between Details and Icons view modes.
To revert the entire folder to the state shown, you simply need to press the big green Restore button. The arrow buttons to either side let you step back and forward through changes within the folder. If you only want to restore a selection of files or subfolders, simply select them and hit the button. By default, each file will be placed back in its original location, and if a newer version exists you’ll be asked if you want to overwrite it. If you want to keep both, click the cogwheel icon at the top right of the window and select “Restore To”; you’ll then be prompted to choose a different destination for your recovered files.
If you’re not sure which older version of a file is the one you want, File History has one last clever trick: right-click on a file and you’ll see a single menu option appear – “Preview”. This option will show you the contents of Office documents, PDFs, images and many other file types, right inside the File History interface, with controls allowing you to browse back through previous versions and restore the right one. You can also open File History in Preview mode by selecting an individual file in Explorer before clicking History.
A word of warning
If you’ve struggled with backup discipline in the past, File History is the answer to your prayers: it requires absolutely no effort on your part (beyond the initial setup) and, aside from the cost of storage and your Windows licence, it’s free.
If you need a fail-safe backup system, however – for example, if you’re self-employed and your livelihood depends on certain documents and figures – then you probably shouldn’t rely solely on File History. For one thing, it can’t back up open files, so if you tend to leave documents open on your desktop and work on them over the course of a week, you’re taking a risk.
File History also only lets you specify a single backup destination, which will almost inevitably be inside your home – so if there’s a natural disaster or a break-in, you could lose everything. We suggest you consider partnering File History with some sort of cloud backup system, even if the latter is only used for a small subset of truly indispensable files.
Let’s keep things in perspective, though. The vast majority of personal data loss happens when we accidentally or misguidedly delete or overwrite an important file. File History lets you undo such a mistake in moments, even long after the fact – so in terms of how much effort it takes to operate, versus how much trouble it can save you, it might be the most useful and valuable Windows feature ever.