Undelete’s File Versioning
Undelete allows you to save multiple versions of the same file
“If you make a bunch of changes to a file and then save it and then think, ‘ARGH! I didn’t want to save that’. Well, you have by default 5 versions of that same file with Undelete,” Spencer Allingham, Engineer
Featuring:
Spencer Allingham, Engineer
Description:
This video is the 3rd in a series of 7 videos by a top Condusiv engineer that each demonstrate different technical features and benefits of the software. In this video, our engineer covers Undelete’s versioning feature that allows you to save multiple versions of the same file. Very helpful if you accidentally overwrite a file, or click “Save” before you should have done! See it in action here…
Additional Undelete videos in this series
Video #1: Undelete 11 Overview
Video #2: Why Some Deleted Files Are Not In The Windows Recycle Bin
Video #3: What is Undelete file versioning?
Video #4: Searching the Undelete Recovery Bin
Video #5 : Inclusion and Exclusion Lists in Undelete
Video #6: Emergency Undelete Software
Video #7: How to safely delete files before recycling your computer with Undelete
View the full playlist on YouTube
[transcript]
00:02 Spencer Allingham: Hello there, in this video, I wanted to show you and really tell you about the file versioning protection that’s in the Undelete software. Basically, this means that if you’re working with Microsoft Office documents like Word or Excel or PowerPoint, straight out of the box, the Undelete software will actually keep several versions of the same file, very helpful if you accidentally overwrite a file with the same file name, or if you make a bunch of changes to a file and then save it, and then think, “Argh! I didn’t wanna save that, I’ve just actually removed some stuff that I wanted to keep from that file.” Well, you have by default, five versions of that same file, and so let’s show that. On the desktop here, I have my important report document, let’s open that up, and this is actually is a report document that I’ve written previously and it contains lots of good content.
01:08 SA: So let’s say… Actually, I don’t want this information anymore from here on. Yeah, I don’t need the video in there anymore, let’s get rid of that. Okay, that’s good. And then we’ll save that and then… Oh wait, no. That edit that I’ve just done, I didn’t… Oh, I shouldn’t have got rid of that video. I wanted it to be embedded in that word document, but now I’ve saved it, so I can’t just close it and open it again because that data is not there, it’s been removed. I removed it and then saved the file. Oops. So this is where the versioning becomes very handy. I can open up the recovery bin and I know the file was on my desktop, you can use the search recovery bin to find files, but I’m gonna save that for another video to go through all the search functions. So let’s go straight to my desktop, now you’ll see here my… Here’s my important report document, but it’s got three copies, three versions of that same file that have been saved.
02:25 SA: Now I can right click on them and I can simply recover all three versions if I want to, and I’ll just give them a different number at the end of the file name when it recovers them for you, or I can view the copies. So I can see I’ve got three different versions here, and I can see, of course, they all have the same file name, I can see their file sizes, I can see what date they were overwritten and time, when they were last modified, who overwrote them, and on which machine. So S ALLI is my user name, Spencer Allingham, and who owns the files. So if I want to have a quick look and find the version I want before I recover at one of those three, I wanna make sure I get the right one. I can just simply double click them and open them up straight from the bin and have a look, so that’s not the version that I want. That was the one I was playing with earlier, although it does have the video in. So let’s have a look at this version.
03:32 SA: Well, actually that looks pretty good, and it has the video in, perfect. So I’m gonna recover that version, that’s the one that I want. So I say recover that, recover it back to the original location, but I could recover it to some other folder if I wanted to. We’ll say okay, close off our Undelete recovery bin, and now our important report document is restored, that version has been put back for you, so let’s open that up and just double check it. Is our video embedded back in there? Yes, it is. So handy feature when you’re working with things like Microsoft Office document. I mean we’ve all done it at some point accidentally overwritten a file or modified it in such a way or deleted a chunk of data then hit save before perhaps we should have done. [chuckle] But anyway, let’s have a quick look at the settings that you can modify quite a bit actually.
04:33 SA: So if you go into the settings tab on the ribbon and then go into properties, you can see here we have a versions tab, and this is where the versioning is configured. So you can say, enable or disable saving your file versions, so you can turn it off if it’s something that doesn’t interest you and isn’t gonna work for you. You can say limit the file to ‘n’ number of versions. So by default, it’s five versions, I believe, but you can increase that if you wanted more versions very easily and just hit Apply. Now you can see the file types that it will say versions of by default, so it’s Word documents, PowerPoint documents and Excel spreadsheets. But let’s say, I’m a graphic designer and I’m working with Photoshop all day long, and I’m not really making Word documents or PowerPoint files, well, I can add things like Photoshop PSD files to the list. We do have a list of other file types already there that you can just simply move across and say, if I’m a web designer, for example, I want… I want these file extensions to have versions, it’s that easy.
05:45 SA: But let’s say, I’m working with Photoshop and I want my PSD files versioned, I can say dot PSD, it’s my custom file type, and I can add that too. So now I can have different version of PSD files, or let’s say I’m working with Adobe PDF documents, easy to add those as well. If there’s something in there which I know I don’t really want versioning turned on, I can remove them. Simple as that, so it’s quite configurable to set up for what is appropriate for you, what do you want to have versioning on and what do you not want to have it on? Simple as that, really. So I hope that helps, I hope it’s useful. And I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Take care.
Use Undelete’s Versioning feature to quickly recover overwritten Office, PSD, PDF, and many other file types quickly and easily.