In order not to search through the numerous folders on your computer for a file that you recently viewed or created, the developers operating system created a special section. This section contains links to all files that have been recently used on your computer. Although there are such cases that it is easier to find the desired file using the search system.
How to view the history of viewed files?
5. It is worth remembering that this opportunity provided only for those programs that are most frequently used on your computer. For other programs this option not available through the start menu. In some applications, this option is provided in the main menu of this program.
The moment you open your personal computer documents, view photos, or play videos, all these files are stored in the list of recently opened documents, which is easy to call using the menu Start - Recent Documents.
If you don't want anyone to see which documents you're viewing, it's best to clear this list of recent documents.
If the menu item "Recent Documents" you do not have, then it is disabled in the settings. How to include it in the menu Start, written at the end of this lesson.
To clear the list of recent documents, click on the button Start and in the menu that opens, click right click mouse by point "Recent Documents". Then you need to select the item "Clear Recent Items List".
After that, the list of recently created documents will be cleared. By the way, the user may not clear this list completely, but remove only certain lines from it on his own.
In order to do this, you need to go to the menu Start - Recent Documents and select the document you wish to delete. Now it remains to click on it with the right mouse button and select the item "Delete". All other lines that are in this list will be saved, and the one you have selected will be deleted without a trace.
If your menu Start item missing "Recent Documents", you can return it. To do this, right-click on the menu Start, select an item there "Properties" and in the window that opens, click the button "Tune".
I want to enable a recovery tool called " Story Windows files 8 ”, an analogue of “Previous File Versions” in Windows 7, but the error “No suitable disks were found and you need to connect an external hard drive” appears. USB disk". External hard drive I don't, but there is an extra partition on my main hard drive under the letter (D:), it has 500 GB of free space! Can't it be adapted to the file history of Windows 8? Nikita.
Hello, friends! Remember Windows 7 had a cool recovery tool called ""? Many readers are interested in how you can use this tool in Windows 8! Yes, this tool can be used, but unlike Windows 7, where it worked quietly and imperceptibly without requiring any action from the user, for this it was only necessary to enable system restore, in Windows 8 we need to enable and configure it.
What's happened " Previous Versions Files" in Windows 7 and "File History" in Windows 8?
A friend of mine works in the Ministry of Emergency Situations, most recently he bought a computer in which two hard drives, the first SSD with operating Windows system 8 and a second simple 1TB SATA III hard drive. When I came to visit him, I installed several necessary programs and turned on "File History". A month later, my friend calls and asks: For two weeks he printed a working report in the program Microsoft Word, all the time keeping it on the desktop and then accidentally deleted it past the trash. Can it be restored somehow? There was desperation in the voice of a friend, and in fact, work on some file for a week, and then it will disappear. But the situation was fixed and helped us in this "Windows 8 File History" Interesting? Read on!
If you are using Windows 7 and have System Restore enabled for the C: drive, then all files on that drive are previous versions. That is, the operating system monitors each file and stores its version in memory every day. For example, you have been typing a term paper for a week and today you accidentally deleted this text file and emptied the trash, this did not mean at all that your document was gone without a trace, you could easily restore yesterday's version of this file. All the details in our article "Previous versions of files in Windows 7. File History in Windows 8 works exactly the same, but many users, having installed Windows 8, did not find the familiar “Previous versions of files” parameter in the folder properties and panicked, but in vain, there is a similar tool in Windows 8, but it has a different name “File History” and is turned off by default. Let's enable this tool and see how it works.
Right click in the left corner and select Control Panel,
Then System and Security
And finally File History.
Clicking on the Enable button does not work, then select Change disk,
Immediately after that, you may get an error: Suitable discs not found. Connect external drive or try another drive if yours is not listed.
Note: File History in Windows 8 will only work if you have an external USB hard drive connected to your computer or if you have two different hard drives in your system. The question of users who have one large hard drive divided into two or more partitions is logical: “Why can’t you connect File History if there is a first drive C: and Windows 8 is on it, and the second D: and there is practically nothing on it. Answer: It is possible to use an additional partition D: for the “File History”, you just need to provide it to the D: drive network access. How to do this is explained later in the article.
If we connect a USB portable hard drive or a second hard drive to our computer, and then launch the File History tool, a window will appear in which the program will prompt us to select a disk for file history. Select the disk (in my case G:) and click OK.
If you have several available disks in the previous window, then you can change the disk for "File History" at any time
By default, every hour, files located on the desktop and in the contents of the libraries will be copied to drive G:.
If you have an important folder with the necessary documents that you are constantly working on and you can’t lose this folder in any way, transfer it to your desktop or to one of the libraries. The contents of this folder will be constantly copied to drive G: If the files in this folder change, for example, text documents are constantly updated with information, then on backup disk G: will be created various versions files you are working on.
For example, I created a folder on the desktop called "New Folder", after a while its backup copy, with all the contents, will be created on drive G: in the folder
G:\FileHistory\Username\Computername\Data\C\Users\Username
Folder exclusions.
I would exclude the folders where you store "heavy files": movies, music, as their backups will fill up the space of your USB portable drive very quickly. Folder exclusions.
For example, select the Video folder. Folder selection
How often will our files be copied to this folder?
First, you can start archiving whenever you need. Click Launch. To find out more precise settings for "File History", click the "Advanced Options" button
Keep copies of files- you can set any value, from 10 minutes to 12 hours or once a day and the files will be copied after the period of time you need.
Offline cache size– if the disk selected for storing copies is not connected to the computer, backup files will be stored on the main hard drive. When you connect a USB drive with archived copies, the contents of the cache will be immediately overwritten to it. The default volume is 5%.
Keep saved versions- 1 month. Exactly one month later, archive copies of files created a month ago will be deleted. If you want to keep file backups forever, then select the Always option, but be aware that your disk space for file backups may run out soon.
How to recover files from history
The easiest way to restore a file from a backup is to simply open the disk containing the file history (in our case, G:) and copy the desired file from there. On drive G: the backup files of drive C: are stored in the folder
G:\FileHistory\Username\Computername\Data\C\Users\Username
You can easily find the file you need. The backup date of your files is added to the backups of your files, for example, when I wrote this article, Windows 8 File History created backup copies of a text document every two hours - Article on the site (2013_09_02 07_16_48 UTC).docx and an hour later another copy Article on website (2013_09_02 07_17_48 UTC).docx. If you need a backup copy of the file created two hours ago, select it. If you need a week-old copy, please copy it.
There is another way to restore your files from a backup. In the File History window, select Restore Personal Files.
For example, if you want to replace all files on your desktop from a backup, right-click on the folder and select Restore.
Replace files in destination folder– the existing original file will be replaced by its backup copy.
Skip this file- the existing original file will not be replaced by the backup.
Ask for each file- you will have to compare file versions and choose the one that remains,
For example, we want to replace an existing file with its backup, check the first file and click Continue and your text file in the "New Folder" folder will be replaced with the backup.
If you tick both files, then both versions of the file will be saved - current and backup.
How to enable "File History" if you have only one hard drive in your computer
Even if this hard drive is divided into several partitions, when you try to enable "File History", you will get the error "No suitable drives were found and you need to connect an external USB hard drive." The fact is that your Windows 8 is insured if your hard drive fails, which means that all partitions on the hard drive will be inaccessible, respectively, all your backups will sink into oblivion along with other files. If you are not afraid of this situation, let's try to locate the "Windows 8 File History" on another partition of your hard drive, for this, you will need to share this partition.
Open the Computer window, select for example drive E: and share it, right-click on it and select Properties
And Access, then Advanced setup,
Put a tick on Open general access to this folder, and click on Permissions 
Apply, OK.
Apply.
In the computer window, click on the Network icon,
Then double-click the left mouse on the name of our computer
And we see that our entire E: drive is shared.
Now open the "File History", select Change Disk.
Add a network location.
We double-click on the name of our computer with the left mouse,
Select drive E: and click Select Folder.
It happens that they climbed on someone else's computer in search of compromising evidence on a good person, and found nothing. And now in the history of recent files you can see what and when you opened. You should be ashamed ... In order not to lose your honor and not lose confidence, we will consider in this instruction how to clear the folder of recent documents on Windows example 7.
Of course, in no case should you climb into other people's computers. But the knowledge from this article should be in everyone's head, because not knowing this is as embarrassing as digging into other people's files.
In fact, everything is very simple. So simple that I even thought about whether to write an article about it. But I decided to write anyway.
During the following steps, UAC security messages may pop up. Everyone has to agree. In general, I would recommend.
So, first let's figure out where Window 7 stores recent documents. To do this, enable . Then go to the following address: C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent (or C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent Documents).
If your operating system is on a different drive, and not on C, then you need to look for it on the drive where it is.
From this Recent Documents folder, you can delete all or selective recent open files Windows 7. And then you need to delete it from the trash too.
There is another way to clear recent documents in Windows 7. Click Start. Select the "Recent Documents" item there, right-click on this folder and select "Clear Recent Documents List". After that, delete the files from the trash as well.
The second method to clear recent Windows 7 documents is simpler than the first, but the first is given if the second fails.
If necessary, you can disable recent Windows 7 files. This is also very simple.
Right-click on the taskbar, select "Properties".
Then go to the "Start Menu" tab and uncheck the box next to "Store and display a list of recently opened items in the Start menu and on the taskbar."
Then click the "Settings" button in the same window. In the window that opens, look for the line "Recent Documents" and uncheck it too. Click here "OK" and again "OK" in the previous window.
All. If you click "Start", then there will be no item with recent documents. Files that were open before you disabled this feature will also be deleted. Latest open documents Windows 7 are disabled and not saved.
The File History tool in Windows 10 is a great tool for Reserve copy your documents, photos, music and other information. It allows you to save your data with a certain frequency and, if necessary, restore exactly the versions of files that you need.
This component first appeared in Windows 8 and is still in demand as one of the backup tools.
When can File History be useful to you? Here are some examples:
Restoring information requires a lot of time and money, so using the File History tool, you can not worry about the safety of your data.
First of all, to use this tool, you need to connect any external drive to which the backup data will be stored. It may be additional HDD, external hard disk or USB flash drive. You can also use a network drive.
On the left in the list of items, select the section " Archiving Service". Here you will need to specify on which device you are going to save the backup files. To do this, click on the item "".
Windows will search for available drives and display them in the list on the left. The figure below shows that the system has detected a USB flash drive.
Select the desired device. After that, the backup function using file history should be activated.
After activating File History, this tool needs to be configured. To do this, follow the link " Other Options" as shown in the figure above.
Here you can see information about your media and the size of the data used for the backup.
Button " Archive data now' speaks for itself. With it, you can backup your files at any time.
You can also configure the frequency of backups (from 10 minutes to a daily backup).
The time interval during which backups will be stored can be set in the " Keep my backups". Here you can set values from 1 month to 2 years, always or until you need free space.
The following is a list of folders that are being backed up. By default, these are the Desktop, Documents, Pictures, etc. folders. Those. standard set folders that is linked to the current user.
If this set of folders is not enough for you, you can always add additional folder using the item " Add folder". It is worth noting that the Windows 10 file history can also be configured through the classic control panel, but you can add your own folders only in the computer settings.
To exclude individual folders from this list, just select required folder and press the button " Delete". There is also a way to disable backups for folders without deleting them from the list using the " Exclude these folders».
Paragraph " View advanced options” opens the file history settings in the control panel, although the settings in the current window are quite enough.
Let's create Text Document in folder " Documentation” containing an arbitrary set of records.
For this file to be in backup storage you need to either manually perform the save procedure, or wait for the time for automatic backup of files. To speed up this process, set the minimum autosave period in the settings to 10 minutes.
Let's wait more than 10 minutes, and delete this file without putting it in the trash ( Shift+Del).
Now, in order to restore the file, you need to select the "Home" tab in the top panel in the "Documents" folder and click the "" button.
In the next window, select the file you want to restore and click on the button in the form of a circular arrow.
All. The file has been restored.
Now let's check how this tool works if the content of the file has been changed. Let's open it for editing, delete one line and save the document.
In order not to wait 10 minutes, go to the archiving options and perform a manual backup. Next, open the journal again and use the arrows below to find the version of the document for a specific date and time.
After performing the recovery, we eventually got the original file.
If you're curious about how the system backs up files, you can open your drive and look at the folder structure. Backups the file used for the example were saved to the following path:
Drive -> FileHistory -> Username -> Computer Name -> Data -> C-> Users -> Username -> Documents
Whether or not to use File History in Windows 10 is up to you, but in any case, this easy-to-use tool can be considered one of the worthy backup and restore methods in Windows 10.
