Browsing File History

PCs & Laptops For Dummies

For a full view of files and folders that are backed up on your PC, you can use the File History browser. You might find this file recovery method better than hunting down files and folders and right‐clicking on them. The File History browser window is shown here.

Browsing for files and folders to recover.

To visit the File History window, follow these directions:

Tap the Windows key.
Type File History
Choose the item Restore Your Files with File History. It probably won't be the top item in the search results.

This list of items you see in the File History window match those folders you selected for backup when File History was configured.

To restore an item, select it and then click the big green Restore button. As with restoring individual files, you'll be prompted about whether you want to replace the original file.

If you want to restore a file, folder, or group to a specific folder, click the Gear icon and choose the Restore To command. Select a folder for the backup files.

Use the left and right arrows to browse your file history. The backup date and time are shown at the top of the window.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.