Managing File History in Windows 10

File History is great feature of Windows 10, but it can be even better with some tweaking by you. If you have not turned on File History yet or don’t know what it is, you can learn more about File History here.

By default, Windows 10 File History saves copies of files and folders until space on the drive gets low. And by default it backs up new or changed versions of files/folders every hour.

We’ve left our “Save copies of files” at the default settings -“Every hour”. Using the drop down menu, you can choose anything from every 10 minutes to every day. Every hour is good for us. When writing a newsletter or doing graphics work, saving files every hour gives us a fallback just in case, if a program freezes or we accidentally reboot our computers, the work is saved in File History every hour. So we might not get all our work back, but the most we’ll lose is an hour’s work, instead of the entire day’s work.

We don’t work fast enough to have to set it to every ten minutes, do we EB?

But let’s go beyond the stuff we already covered in this article and show you some advanced settings in File History, specifically, how to clean up File History. You can clean up all the file history but the latest ones, or choose to clean up all files older than 1 months, 2 months, 3 months, and all the way up to 2 years.

So how do you get to these settings? In Windows 10, right-click on the Start Button can choose “Control Panel”. Make sure you’re in icon view (top right) and click on File History. In the left pane you’ll see “Advanced settings”. Click on “Advanced settings”.

Once you click on Advanced settings you’ll see the dialog below. Click on “Clean up versions” and you’ll see the “Delete older versions of files and folders” dialog (below).

You can clean up your File History files and folder backups by selecting one of the options of under delete files (see below). You can choose to delete files “Older than 1 month” or all the way up to 2 years. You can also choose to save only the very newest copy of each file/folder.

And that’s how you can keep your File History clean. You’ll also note you can change the File History drive and exclude folders from your File History backup. Now you can take control of Windows 10 File History!