Page 853 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

Note

There was a similar but less sophisticated feature in Windows 7 called either Previous Versions or
Shadow Copy, long gone now.

The beauty of File History is that it’s automatic and invisible. And to save
time and disk space, File History bothers copying only the files that have

changed since the last restore point was created.

Set Up File History

The File History feature has its own dashboard in → → Update &

Security → Backup (Figure 16-5, top).

File History works best if you direct it to create its backups on some other
drive—not the one the files are on now. The whole point, after all, is to

provide protection against something going wrong—and disk failure is a
big something. So you’re supposed to use an external drive—even a flash
drive with decent capacity will do—or another computer on the network.

If there’s already a second drive connected to your computer, Windows
cheerfully begins using it to store the backups. If you’ve got more than one,
hit “Add a drive” and choose it.

And that, dear reader, is it. If the “Automatically back up my files” button is
on, then your computer is backing up your files automatically, once every
hour. Isn’t peace of mind wonderful?

File History Options

On the → Update & Security → Backup screen, the “More options” link
takes you to a wonderland of additional settings (Figure 16-5, bottom):

Back up now. If you can’t wait for the hourly backup, this button

lets you trigger a backup now.