OK, so who wants to laugh at this ageing techie?

I decided that yesterday would be the day I gave my 32Gb iPhone a much needed clean up. With less than 1Gb free space remaining, I need to give myself some breathing space. So, I import all the photos and videos from the iPhone  into a ‘dump’ folder I made on my desktop, which I use for just such purposes, then I wiped the phone. OK so far. 15Gb now free and hundreds of photos and videos to wade through later.

Then, two days later, I find that somehow that dump folder does not contain all the things I copied over from the iPhone. Not sure how it happened. These are personal files, just snaps for the most part, so I wasn’t perhaps as careful as I should have been. Whatever happened, the end result is that none of the videos and many of the photos were simply not there. I’m not going to blame the computer. I’m going to blame the user. Whatever I did, it was what my geek friends and I would term an epic fail. Still, I’m not beaten yet. Far from it. We have plans for this scenario.

Situation: The iPhone is empty. None of my iPhone backups have that material, because I cleared those out as well during my purge. Well, I don’t need it any more, right? I have copied everything to the computer for safe keeping! Except…the desktop folder doesn’t have it and, of course, like a good little techie I have emptied my recycle bin. Bum. I’m still not beaten yet!

Good job I have File History configured and turned on… I am going to thank myself for being sensible enough to use this fantastic feature, and be grateful to Microsoft for adding it to every version of Windows since version 7. With File History, your documents, desktop files, Libraries and any other folders you want are monitored and backed up to a location of your choice. More, any changes to those files are also backed up. What does that mean? Imagine you wrote an essay or a spreadsheet, then made changes and wanted to go back seven versions to the original draft or layout. That’s why it is called File History. You can keep as many versions as you want, automatically. So…

I just rolled back a couple of days and found the original files that were on the desktop immediately after I imported them from the phone. All the photos and all of the videos are there, happily waiting to be restored to their original location. Two clicks and two minutes later, I’m sitting watching one of the videos that would otherwise have been gone forever. Nothing missing. No damage. No harm, no foul. In this instance, Microsoft came through and delivered exactly what they promised, right when it was needed. They don’t get enough praise for that. So from me to Microsoft, well played, Microsoft, well played indeed.

Time to go. I have a whole bunch of photos and videos to wade through.