• Windows file History to disappear in the Fall Creators Update?

    Posted on June 5, 2017 at 00:31 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    There’s a lot of speculation on the web about the future of the Windows File History feature.

    You may recall that Windows 8’s File History replaced Windows 7’s “Previous version” shadow copy capability. Both maintain backup copies of user files stored in common locations. It was one of the big selling points for Windows 8 — as I described in InfoWorld five years ago:

    (In Windows 8), Microsoft is finally catching up with Apple’s Time Machine by introducing a very straightforward file backup feature called File History, found in Control Panel.

    Ends up that the mistakenly-pushed build 16212 of Windows 10 doesn’t include File History. The peripatetic Walking Cat found a telltale character string in one of the build 16212 system files:

    “Making new backups with File History is no longer supported.”

    You can read that a lot of ways, and there’s always a chance that it won’t appear in the final version of the Fall Creators Update, expected in September of this year. But it would be characteristic of Microsoft’s push to get your data into their cloud.

    Paul Thurrott has an excellent outline on Thurrott.com of the arguments in favor of dumping File History, with one key argument: If you’re updating a file from two different computers, the “latest” version won’t synch correctly.

    Microsoft may use that as a reason to get you to use OneDrive. Then again, they may have a more complex — and compelling — argument by the time Fall Creators Update arrives. Or it may be a phantom harbinger of the next, next version of Windows 10.

    Personally, it won’t make much difference for me. I have all of my important files in Dropbox and use it religiously, with occasional manual backups in OneDrive. I’m still amazed at how easy it is to grab a laptop (or phone) and go on the road, with all of my files — going back many years — sitting there, waiting for me, no matter which OS I’m using on what computer.

    Windows News ,
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