Enable File History in Windows 10 to Safeguard Your Files

When you have painstakingly worked hard on some documents or projects burning midnight oil for weeks and months, the first fear that infiltrates your mind is – “what if something happens to this disk and I lose all of my hard work ?” And this fear is not totally baseless, people have actually lost their valuable data stored on their hard disks, solid state disks and other type of media because of malware attacks, disk corruption, physical damage, theft, fire or some other unforeseeable event. The only solution against data loss is keeping regular backups of your files. We have discussed multiple data backup solutions on TrishTech.com before, but you can actually use the in-build data backup feature of Windows 10 to safeguard your personal files.

The File History feature in Windows 10 allows you to keep backups of files stored inside a user’s profile. While this does not cover all the files, but all the files on a user’s profile folders like Desktop, Favorites, Libraries & Contacts are included in the backup. Here is how you can enable the File History in Windows 10:

  1. Attach an external USB disk to your PC. This disk is going to be used for backups. If you have more than one HDD/SSD attached to your PC, then you can use one of them for backup.
  2. Press the hotkey Win+X and select Control Panel from the menu that shows up.Create Password Reset Disk in Windows 10
  3. When the Control Panel opens up, under the System & Security category, select Save backup copies of your files with File History.Windows 10 Enable File History
  4. If you have more than one disks available that are suitable for backup, then click on Select Drive from the left side menu and choose one of the disks from the list.
  5. Finally click on the Turn On button to enable the File History feature in Windows.Windows 10 Enable File History

After you enable the File History, Windows will create a backup of all of your files located inside the user profile folders so that in case of any file corruption or had disk damage, you can restore these files from the backups.