I was surprised that these kinds of files on my system partition have "previous versions" available.
As far as I can see, File History is off and Onedrive is not active.
Could the "system restore" mechanism be keeping copies?
I thought .txt files and similar documents were not affected by system restore,
but I see .txt files in my documents folder have "previous versions" - Please advise
Hi, please bear in mind that informative text is generic and as such indicative only. Nor is it complete.
It does not mean - and nor does the presence of the Previous Versions tab - that a previous version exists.
If you were to search the huge searchable Tutorials section, you might find
Restore Previous Versions of Files, Folders, and Drives in Windows 10
If you can't find a file on your computer or you accidently modified or deleted a file, you can try to restore it from a previous version.
The previous versions feature in Windows 10 allows you to restore a previous version of files, folders, and drives that were saved or backed up as part of a restore point, File History, and/or Windows Backup.
If a file, folder, or drive was not included in a restore point, added to File History, or included in a Windows Backup, then there will be no previous versions available for it.
As for System Restore - remember that this does NOT 'back up' typical user files. It addresses and monitors a specific range of system and executable file types. A list is given in the relevant tutorial. txt files, for example, are not included.
The only likely overlap with user-generated files and System Restore is certain kinds of script files where these types may be used as part of the O/S.
Note that there does not seem an overlap between OneDrive versioning and Previous Versions as here.
Example where one exists:
It does seem you have a previous version of that file. I can see no obvious quick way to tell where it is stored, so why not try opening it, then do a File>Save-as, and see where Explorer tries to save it - in my case, doing that tries to save to my file history path. If it is from a restore point, that may not work - it would be unusual for RPs to save user files, I don't know how that came about.
Hello -
on the particular file I showed above, the previous version certainly does exist.
If you click "open" on the "previous version" tab, notepad will open with the previous version
of the txt file (previous version does not have the "=" on the second line)
At this point I'm just interested in what mechanism is being used to backup this file,
I've never come across this before
Thank you very much for your reply.
See my previous post for a possible hint.
Another way to generate shadow copies (from which previous versions can be restored):
How to enable Previous Versions to recover files on Windows 10 - Pureinfotech
See from:
Enable Previous Versions from Shadow copies
It all depends on what you were doing/had enabled at the time the previous version was saved.
Sadly my crystal ball (currently down for unforeseen maintenance) doesn't operate well retrospectively.
Yes, I did try "save as" - the directory it start in is the same directory the main file is - documents.
Regarding Dennis's thought - doesn't seem to the case. I changed the txt file yesterday as can be seen
from "date modified" in Windows Explorer, but the date in properties/ "previous versions" of 10/25/2018 must
have been either when the file was last changed or was created (in 2018)
I'm still digesting Dalchina's comments and links.
I found a task scheduler entry for "File History" which I disabled and rebooted, but these "copies" are still
being created
HI dalchina. "Windows Backup" has become a bit of a loaded term, expecially since MS introduced
that non-removable app they introduced a couple of months back.
That one I got rid of by uninstalling the "experience pack".
I'm not consciously using it, I don't remember ever turning anything on.
The system tells me this. IS there anything else? I'm using a local account in Windows 10
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