Online backup services and the value of version histories

Posted by kent on December 17th, 2009

Last month, someone asked a question about file corruption. They wondered if their online backup service could restore working versions of files that had become corrupted on their hard drive. I suggested that "versioning" or "file history" might come to their rescue. This feature, offered by most online backup services, holds on to a certain number of past iterations of your files. It's a powerful tool that can do more than save you from corrupted files; it can save you from your mistakes.

We all know the power of the "undo." You write a bad sentence, and you can undo it. You accidentally crop your significant other out of a photo, and you can undo it. If you happen to flatten a multi-layered Photoshop file that took you weeks to create, well, you can undo that too. But if you should save the file after doing any of those changes, you can't undo them anymore.

That's where online backup comes in. By choosing to restore to an earlier version of a file, you can often recover it in a pre-changed state. It's like a master undo command. How well it works depends a lot on when you last saved your file, and when your online backup service last ran its backup. If you created the file this morning, and your backup ran last night, it won't help. But if you have a long-term project (or if you use a service like SugarSync that runs a file backup every time you save), it can be a real life saver.

The last time we checked, Carbonite, SugarSync, Mozy, and IDrive, all offer some kind of version history functionality.