Be it, developers, data scientists, photoshop experts or Office users, Version Control or Version History is the most used and important feature these days. With the modern emphasis on work collaboration, you actually need to maintain different copies of different versions. So that you can switch back to a stage earlier in time if anything wrong happens. And since most of the collaboration happens in the cloud, version history is a major feature offered by cloud storage providers.
If you’ve been a OneDrive user, you might have noticed that version history was already available for all the document files. You could easily go back in time and restore the documents from an earlier stage. But OneDrive recently announced that they’ve been extending this feature to support all file types. This not only makes it viable to use OneDrive for more purposes but also adds functionality to existing version history feature.
OneDrive Version History restores old files
As the feature is now available for all the file types, you need not worry about your files being getting accidentally edited. You may find this feature useful if you deal a lot with PDFs, Images, AutoCAD Projects, Videos and Office Document files. Or if you work a lot on project based files, version history can help you a lot if you are collaborating with someone. As it will be easy to revert changes if they do not fit in.
Since version history is meant to protect your files from unwanted accidental changes and not to actually keep a record of its history. OneDrive will keep an older version of your file only for 30 days. And after that, the older version will be completely removed.
How to use Version History on OneDrive
Version History is the most important feature offered by a cloud storage provider. While OneDrive already had this feature in place for Office documents, its extension towards all file types is definitely a great move. Google Drive already offers this feature, and you can use similar steps to restore back to a version.
It is super simple to restore your files to an earlier version. Open up your OneDrive account and navigate to the file whose versions you are looking for.
Right click the file and select ‘Version History’ to view older versions of that file. Now you can click on any of the older version to view or restore it. It is recommended to review the older version before restoring it to the actual location.
Apart from the modification date and time, the user who made the changes is also specified. So that you can instantly roll back changes made by a user by switching to a version earlier than their version.
This feature has already started rolling out and you can expect this feature anytime soon in your OneDrive account. In a blog post, Microsoft has mentioned this feature only for Personal Accounts and there is no news about OneDrive for Business – but we’d be glad if any ‘OneDrive for Business’ user can confirm about it in the comments section below.
