The ONE Best Windows Feature You're NOT Using

there is one windows feature that we're gonna focus on today that you are probably gonna hate yourself for not knowing about and using up until now and this is actually not a feature i've really talked about before so it's probably going to be new to most of you and it's called backup using file history now you might be thinking well i already know that windows has an automatic backup feature but wait because this feature does way more than simply backing up files in case your hard drive dies or in a disaster it actually is an extremely useful feature that you can use every single day let me explain this feature which is built right into windows 10 makes it so you're not just backing up the files but it also backs up multiple versions of each file for example maybe you're working on a microsoft word document or an excel spreadsheet and you make a mistake you accidentally delete a bunch of the data without realizing it and then you go and save the data and then close out of the program so that the next time you run it and realize you messed it all up because you closed out of the program you can't undo it and bring it all back but with this feature enabled you can actually go into file properties and you'll see that there are older versions of the file that are accessible so you can either restore the old version completely or open it and just access the lost part and bring it into the new updated version that you've been working on since then so obviously i am going to show you how to set this up and it's dead simple it's way easier than you're probably thinking before we continue though i want to thank the sponsors of this video privacy.com and one password who just teamed up to do something really cool i want to tell you about if you're not already familiar with them privacy.com lets you create virtual payment cards you can use to buy things online without revealing your real credit card info and one password is a password manager with enterprise great security 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when you sign up to them so definitely worth checking out again go to the links in the description if you're interested and having said all that let's continue all right so to enable this feature all you have to do is go into the settings for windows then update in security back up and then go to where it says backup using file history you're gonna have to add a drive an external drive it doesn't have to be anything fancy you could literally use a basic external usb drive like i did here it's an old drive it doesn't have to be fast of course faster is better if you have a lot of files and theoretically you could even just use a basic thumb drive but obviously i would recommend a full-size drive this design for doing things like backup if you do want to get fancy though you can also add network drives such as if you have a nas connected to your network or even some routers allow you to hook up a usb external drive to the router and then access that drive from all computers on your network so basically a network drive that way so you can do all sorts of things just have some kind of drive you can back these files up onto so anyway after you choose a drive to backup to you can go in and see which folders are being backed up and it looks like by default it's going to back up all your library folders so that's your documents videos pictures music folders and any other folders that are in your user directory now if you're a average typical user these defaults are probably fine i wouldn't think you're going to be storing any files outside of the user's folders but do keep in mind if you have created directories outside of the user folder that you use to store things just know that you might want to add those folders as additional folders to be backed up there's also an option to add excluded folders which is pretty self-explanatory i don't know maybe you have a folder within the user folder that has a bunch of huge files that you don't really care about you can just exclude those if you want so just to keep it simple for demonstration purposes i'll add an example folder that i created and we can look at that some other important options you can choose are how frequently to do the backup of each file and also how long to keep backed up files and this is going to depend on several things for example how big the hard drive is if you have a multi-terabyte hard drive you probably don't have to worry about it getting filled up also if you're dealing mostly with just text documents and stuff not a bunch of big videos again you could probably just store as many versions and frequently as you want also keep in mind it's only going to back up a new version of each file if it's changed so if you're keeping all the files exactly the same then it's not like every single hour it's going to be making a copy of those it's going to see oh okay since the previous hour this file has changed it'll make a copy and update it that way so if you don't update the files very frequently it doesn't really matter so i would think for most people just keeping it on the hourly frequency for backup is probably fine but also keep in mind you can always manually initiate a backup at any time even more frequently if you want so to demonstrate how all this works i'll just create a basic text file as an example and i'll just make it empty and then rather than wait again i can just initiate a backup now and then i'll make a few changes and back up each change but otherwise keep in mind this would just be automatic over time and then if i do realize that i need to access a backup copy there are several options for how to do so so in any case you're going to have to right click on the file and then go to properties and then look at the tab that says previous versions so here's a few options you could see all the different previous versions so you click on one and if i click open it will simply open up that file in whatever program is default but this won't necessarily overwrite or restore that file i can also click the drop down arrow next to open and hit open in file history which this is a really cool feature basically it opens up this window and you can click the arrows at the bottom on the left or right to sort through the different versions of the file and it'll actually show you what's in each version assuming it's like a text file here and then if you find the one you want to restore you can click that big green button at the middle and it will ask you if you want to replace the latest file with this old one also back in the properties window you can just click restore right away which will basically do the same thing it'll ask you if you want to replace the latest version with this restored version you've selected or if you click the dropdown next to a store you can select restore 2 which lets you restore it to a different folder without overwriting the latest version so this is obviously useful if you maybe want to access part of the old file without getting rid of and overwriting the latest one now keep in mind even if you do restore and overwrite the latest version it will still keep that version in the file backup history so if you realize oh i didn't mean to restore that oh i overwrote it you can still go back into the file history and find that previous later version and just restore it back again so if you accidentally restore something and you realize you didn't want to it's no big deal now if you go and look in the drive you're using to back up you can actually see all the backups and folders in there and how it's organizing them for example if i navigate through my drive you can see it basically keeps the same directory structure and then you can see all the different versions of the files of that text file that i created and then you can see that it has basically the name of the file and then the date it was modified and all that and that's basically where it's getting it all from also if you notice that all the different versions of the files are starting to take up too much space you can clean out older versions through another feature so basically in the backup settings window you go to see advanced settings and then on the left side this will bring up the old control panel thing you click advanced settings in here and then click where it says clean up versions and this will let you delete file versions older than whatever time frame you pick so if you don't really care about having versions that are older than a year or whatever else time frame you can just delete those there another cool thing you can do is explore different versions of different files using the file history tool so in the backup options if you go to restore files from a current backup or just search in the start menu for restore your files with file history you'll see basically the same program we saw before but this actually lets you navigate through all the different backed up folders and files and then if you click into one it will show you the versions like before but if you want to backup out of that you can click the up or back arrows at the top and basically navigate through all the different versions of all the different files not just one that we were looking at before so yeah needless to say this is an extremely useful feature even though i already use a cloud backup service for most of my stuff i'm going to start using it for certain select folders that i want to have really easy access to multiple versions so at this point if you had still not been backing up all your files like i've been telling you for years you now have even less of an excuse because this is even more useful on a day-to-day basis so thanks again to privacy.com and one password for sponsoring this video again check out the links in the description to get five dollars if you're new to either of them and start taking advantage of this new integration so if you guys want to keep watching the next video i'd recommend is one i made talking about windows features that you probably did not know that you can disable you can just click on that to go to that video right there so thanks so much for watching and i'll see in the next video

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 95,226

Keywords: technology, tech, windows, microsoft windows, windows feature, windows tips, windows tips and tricks, computers, best windows feature, windows tricks, cool features, cool windows features, windows 10, windows 10 features, best windows 10 feature, windows 10 tips

Id: 69L8BcZtzRE

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020