How to backup & restore Windows 11 files step by step

hi everyone i'm eloy from knowledge channing tech in this video i want to show you how to backup and restore your files and folders in windows 11. the method i'm going to show you uses file history a native functionality in windows 11. i'll be covering in this video the following aspects how to choose a correct external hard drive and how to initialize this hard drive for the backup how to enable file history and how to include also folders that are not by default included in file history and also i wanna show you what happens if you enable onedrive synchronization for your backup and also i'll be covering of course the restoring of files and folders from the backup so the first thing to do is to determine how much data you are going to be backing up so that you get the external hard drive to support this data i'm going to show you how so let me switch to my windows 11 computer and here to know how much data you have click on file explorer and then under file explorer click this pc double click the c drive double click users and here choose your user and then right click on it and then click on properties and here you see i have only one gigabytes of course this is a test pc so you might have like gigabytes and gigabytes anyways at least get an external hard drive that is at least twice the volume of the data you will be backing up so here i have an external hard drive it is 500 gigabytes so i'm gonna be connecting the drive to my 3.0 port on my pc and here's the drive connected and the next step i'm gonna show you is to see if the drive is initialized or not here if you don't see the drive under this pc it means that the drive is not initialized and this is the case here so to initialize the drive all you have to do is to do the following click on the start menu here click on settings and then under settings click on system and then click on storage and under storage here click on advanced storage settings and under advanced storage settings click on disks and volumes and here you have all the drives that are on your computer the drives that are initialized and not initialized so let me expand this a little bit and you notice here this is my external drive and you can recognize it by its size so this is a 500 gigabytes and you see here that it is unallocated so click on unrelocated and then click on create volume under unallocated after you selected and here let's name it backup so i'm just gonna bring to your attention one thing that if your drive is initialized meaning you see it under this pc please don't do this because this will erase all the drive so this is only for drives that you cannot see under this pc so after you name your drive here just click on format keep everything by default and now the drive is initialized and you see it is drive e here if you open it you see that it is empty now so now what i'm gonna show you is how to enable file history so to enable file history you need to start control panel click here on the finder and then key in control panel and start control panel in control panel if you don't have this view here you might have this view here simply click on category and then under category click on large icons and then here click on file history and you'll notice that file history is not turned on now it is saying file history is off it detected also the external hard drive in case you have many hard drives you can select the drive you want to use here but here we have only one external hard drive so all you have to do here is click on turn on so when you turn on file history now it is turned on and with the default settings let me show you a little bit the settings that you can do with file history so first i told you about the select drive this is in case you have many drives this is not the case here and here also you can exclude folders so if you have folders that you don't want to backup you can add them here by clicking on add selecting the folder and then it will be excluded and you have your advanced settings and the advanced settings simply here this is like the schedule which is every hour and keep saved versions it is forever by default here for instance i don't like to keep it forever for myself i mean if you don't use a file after six months it means that you don't need the file so i'm gonna put it six months of course here choose the keep saved versions to the setting that you like and here for safe copies of file on the interval i like to keep it on each hour so here i'm satisfied with these settings i'm gonna click on save changes i'm gonna here force a backup to run now so i'm gonna click on run now and you see file history is copying files because of course we have only one gigabytes it is very fast and for now i mean this is enough if you want to enable file history but now i'm gonna show you also how to add folders that are not included by default in your libraries and this is very important and to achieve this we need to edit a file called config 1.xml i'm going to show you how to do it so click on the finder and then here type percent local up data percent and select the first one and here double click microsoft and let's go to windows double click windows and then double click file history and then double click configuration and here you have the configuration of file listed and this is a config one here file that we're gonna attach only so to do this here let me show you first what folder i'm gonna backup so here let me open a new window and here undersea i have this fair file folder here that i want to backup it has only one file and this is also for the demonstration of course so if i open it and i copy here the path let me minimize this so you need to edit config one dot xml so of course if you want to copy it first to back it up it's a good idea so right click on it and then select open with and then here click choose another app and then click more apps and then click notepad and ok let me here maximize it you see here you have everything that is included in the backup so we need to add a folder and simply here to add a folder you see here user folder click on the end of the line hit enter to open a new line and then respect the format as it is copy this so ctrl c and then here simply press ctrl v and we need to change here this path so the pass i copied it before and here i'm using keyboard history so the windows key with v and then i'm gonna choose the shared files so here you see i added a line that starts with user folder c shared files and then here it ends you see i forgot to put the bracket here should put it like this so to respect the same syntax and now save the file so the file is saved so let's force it back up now to see if it will back up the shared files folder so click on run now and now it is backing up and let's see now if it backed up also the folder that we just added so click on restore personal files and you see here that it added the shared files folder that we just included in the configuration file so here's the file that was in the folder so this is how you add a folder that is not included in your library to be picked up with file history so now we saw how to backup and how to add the folder now i'm gonna show you if you enable onedrive synchronization what will happen simply in a word that your files will still be backed up but the location of the files will change so that you don't find this strange i'm gonna show you so i'm gonna enable here one drive synchronization let me close everything so to enable onedrive synchronization i'm gonna click here i'm gonna do it very quickly so under system here storage advanced storage settings backup options so i'm gonna click setup syncing i'm gonna put here my email address so this is knowledge sharing tech sign in and i'm gonna put my password and sign in so next so now one drive synchronization is enabled for desktop documents and pictures so these are the folders that will be synced to one drive so now onedrive synced all the files and folders to one drive so let me close this window here we don't need it anymore and let me show you what happens now to your files as they are backed up so let's open file history once again so here also you can open file history simply by typing file history and then selecting file history and let's force a backup now click on run now and the backup is underway so now the backup has finished let's click on restore personal files to see what is backed up now so here if you click on documents you'll see that it is empty and don't worry because documents are still saved but they are under onedrive so here double click one drive and you see your documents they are here so all the documents that were local to your pc you can see them under one drive here so the documents are still backed up one thing that you should consider when you enable onedrive synchronization is that the folders that you added manually to config 1.xml will be removed and this happens only when you enable onedrive synchronization so you should re-edit config 1.xml and add these folders and they will stay in this file so now i showed you how to backup i'm gonna show you now the different ways to restore so first let's start with this method so i'm gonna close this one here so i'm gonna open explorer so i'm gonna show you here under documents if i change the document if i wanna restore it what will happen so let me open for instance a local document here so this is a local document it's called ledger it's of course it's fictitious so let me open it let's say i change something here and i don't want to change it so let me say here good morning and then let me save it and then i realized that i don't need this file so to restore it simply right click on it and then click on properties and then click on previous versions and then here you have one previous version only so click on it and then click on restore and then click on replace so this way you replace the corrupted file or the file that you made changes that you don't want the changes in of course here i'm not gonna restore it before i do this let me show you that you can also click here restore to to change the location in case you wanna like compare the two files so let me continue with the restore so i'm gonna replace the file in the destination and here's a file you see if i open ledger so now the old version was restored so this is one way of restoring a file let me show you now for instance if we deleted a complete folder what will happen let me show you on pictures here so let me delete here the personal pic here so it has one file in it let's say i deleted this by mistake and i want to restore it so let me also empty the recycle bin so now there is no way to restore it except for going to the backup and restore it so to do this here we need to start file history so this is file history in our your recent files i'm just gonna click on it and then click on restore personal files and here this is the latest file so we deleted something under pictures so double click pictures and we deleted the personal pick that has this picture here so click on it and then simply click on the button so if you need an older version here before i distort it you can also here you have the versions of the backup they go back in time remember that you configured file history to backup each hour so you will find a version each hour so i'm gonna take the latest one and by default when you open restore here it will open the latest backup so double click on pictures and we need to restore personal pick so click on it and then click on restore so it will simply restore it so it restored it and it opened the pictures folder also automatically so that you can see the restore that happened so this is here the personal pick and this is the file restored so that was it for how to backup and restore files in windows 11. i hope that you enjoyed this video and you found it useful if you did please share it subscribe to my channel and give this video a thumbs up i would really appreciate it and it will help the channel big time i wanna thank you all for watching and see you in the next video

Channel: Knowledge Sharing Tech

Views: 35,104

Keywords: backup your files in windows 11, windows 11 backup, windows 11 restore

Id: LfqOtJOz-_M

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2021