File Versioning
When you need to preserve files that have been deleted or overwritten,
it's often sufficient to select
Recycle bin in synchronization
settings. However, this is only available for local drives and offers
little control on how to store and how long to keep the files.
FreeFileSync therefore has an additional option,
Versioning.
1. Keep only the most recent versions
In synchronization settings, set deletion handling to
Versioning and naming convention to
Replace. Deleted files will be moved to the specified folder
without any decoration and will replace already existing older
versions.
2. Keep multiple versions of old files
- Set deletion handling to Versioning
and naming convention to Time stamp [File]. FreeFileSync will move
deleted files into the provided folder and add a time stamp to each
file name. The structure of the synchronized folders is preserved so
that old versions of a file can be conveniently accessed via a file
browser.
Example: Last versions of the file Folder\File.txt inside folder D:\Revisions
D:\Revisions\Folder\File.txt 2020-12-11 111111.txt
D:\Revisions\Folder\File.txt 2020-12-12 122222.txt
D:\Revisions\Folder\File.txt 2020-12-13 133333.txt
- With naming convention Time stamp [Folder] files are moved into a time-stamped subfolder
of the versioning folder while their names remain unchanged.
This makes it easy to manually undo a synchronization by moving the deleted files from the
versioning folder back to their original folders.
Example: Last versions of the file Folder\File.txt inside folder D:\Revisions
D:\Revisions\2020-12-11 111111\Folder\File.txt
D:\Revisions\2020-12-12 122222\Folder\File.txt
D:\Revisions\2020-12-13 133333\Folder\File.txt
3. Save versions at certain intervals
With naming convention
Replace
it is possible to refine the granularity of versions to keep by adding
Macros
to the versioning folder path. For example, you can save deleted files
on a daily basis by adding the
%date% macro:
Example: Last versions of the file
Folder\File.txt inside folder
D:\Revisions\%date%
D:\Revisions\2020-12-11\Folder\File.txt
D:\Revisions\2020-12-12\Folder\File.txt
D:\Revisions\2020-12-13\Folder\File.txt