4. File History and Version Control
One of the enhanced features in Windows 8—certainly on the version that existed in Windows 7—is File History, which keeps version-controlled backups of your files as you change them.
You can turn this feature on in the full Control Panel by selecting
File History. These previous versions can be stored on a local hard
drive or on a network location, and there are various advanced settings
that you can modify to customize the service to your requirements, as
depicted in Figure 14.
The settings that you can modify include the following:
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Excluding specific folders from the versioning (more on this shortly when I talk about music and pictures)
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The time when file backups are automatically made
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How much of the hard disk is reserved for File Histories
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The length of time Windows should keep saved files
I want to take a moment to talk about music and pictures here,
because the topic of how long you should keep saved files is important.
If you use your computer at home, you probably play music on it or view
pictures and videos. Every time you open one of these files, a file
change occurs, even though you don’t do a thing to it other than gaze at
a photo (or dance with abandon throughout your office, erroneously
assuming no one can see you). This is because the last accessed tag in the file is altered.
As a result, you might find that your File History quickly fills up with versions of your quite large music and image files, while the versions that you actually
want to keep are deleted. To get around this problem you can choose to
exclude your music and/or pictures libraries from the File History.
To restore files by using File History, in the File History window, in the left panel, click the Restore Personal Files link.
5. Determining How Many Backups You Need and Where to Store Them
The nineteenth century playwright and author Oscar Wilde famously
said, “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect,”
and it’s a good motto to live by when deciding how many copies of files,
data, and Windows to have backed up and where to keep them.
I keep three backups of my files and data.
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One backup is on a second hard disk inside my main computer, intended for quick restore.
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One is on a network attached storage box in my home office.
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I periodically mail an incremental backup (on DVD) to a friend.
This strategy covers all the basics for me, from getting back files in a hurry to guarding against fire and theft.
I recommend that you always keep two backups of your files and data.
You should keep one with your computer, or close to it, in case you
inadvertently lose files that you want back in a hurry. You should store
a second backup either with friends or relatives or in a cloud service such as SkyDrive, Carbonite, or Amazon S3.
Offsite backup is
more important in business because often, the data a business owns is
the single most important asset it possesses.
It’s not worth keeping backup images of your copy of Windows 8
remotely because in the case of a fire or theft, you would need a
replacement computer, so your existing backup wouldn’t work unless all
the hardware in the replacement machine was identical to the one that
had been lost.
Caution
If you keep critical copies of backups on removable optical discs, be
aware that they can degrade over time, eventually becoming unreadable.
My advice is to periodically verify that the discs are readable and
replace them with other full backups at least once every 12 months.
Windows 8 contains so many
more ways of backing up your files, folders, and Windows itself that it
can be quite confusing. Especially when you consider that the Refresh
option doesn’t actually restore your desktop software as well as the
more fiddly System Image Backup system.
Despite this, there are good reasons to use
Refresh, not the least of which is that although it might not restore
the configuration options of all your desktop software, it does at least
keep the settings for Windows 8 intact, something that might be more
useful in some circumstances, particularly when you just need to keep
working in a hurry and can launch programs in the Start screen (where
the icons can still be found) while you wait for the computer to be
properly re-imaged later.
