Apps that support the functionality allow you to look at all revisions of a document back to its inception. The other option for retrieving old files in OS X is Versions, a feature introduced in 10.7 Lion. Apple made it simpler for users with the Time Capsule, a router-hard drive combo, but it’s rather expensive at $299 for 2 TB. The main reason people don’t use Time Machine is because it requires an additional bit of hardware: an external drive. It then compresses things into daily backups, which are kept for a month, and weekly backups, which are stored as long as there is space on your external drive.

Backups are made every hour, and hourly backups are kept for 24 hours. Rather than manually backing things up to an external drive every time they change, Time Machine saves new copies of your files automatically, all the time. OS X 10.5 Leopard brought a new type of backups to the PC. That's when this tutorial will come in handy. One day, you'll accidentally delete a file you needed, or save an edit that you meant to save as a new copy, and you'll need to restore a previous version of a file or bring back a file from the grave. You might not need this tutorial today, but be sure to bookmark it. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to restore previous versions of files in OS X, Windows, Dropbox, Google Drive, and even web apps like Evernote and Simplenote. It also means that companies like Dropbox can provide unlimited previous versions of files-and your Mac and PC can automatically save ever single change you make to every file-which saves you the worry of losing your latest render of Star Wars Episode VII. Now you can get around 2 TB, or 20 times as much, for that price.Īll this extra space means that extra hard drives are affordable and everyone can have a backup of their drive locally. Just ten years ago, it was impossible to find anything over 120 GB for $100. As disk space becomes cheaper, you can probably afford a nice 1 TB external drive to keep your Mac backed up with Time Machine. Backup technology has made monumental advances in the past decade.

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