BACK UP FILE REVISIONS

ONE OF THE BENEFITS OF FOLLOWING OUR BACKUP PLAN IS MANY OF THE TOOLS ON OFFER RECORD MULTIPLE VERSIONS OF YOUR FILES, ENABLING YOU TO UNDO CHANGES TO FILES AS WELL AS RESTORE LOST, DELETED OR CORRUPTED DATA. Both Windows backup tools support this, although File History’s default settings of updating your files every hour (rather than weekly, as with the ‘Backup and Restore’ tool) gives greater flexibility.

If you back up files to OneDrive, Dropbox or your own OwnCloud server, access your account through your web browser, then locate the file in question. OwnCloud users should click the ‘Versions’ option next to the filename; otherwise, right-click the file and choose the option to restore a previous version, to see what’s available based on time and date. You can preview earlier revisions by clicking them.

Syncthing only stores one revision of a file by default, but you can change this on a folder-by-folder basis. Right-click the folder bar in Syncthing-GTK and choose ‘Edit’, then select an option from the ‘File Versioning’ menu — each has a description, and you get context-sensitive options, such as the number of versions to keep.

One caveat: Storing multiple versions of files requires more space than straight one-to-one backups. Bear this in mind when choosing what size hard drive to buy.