When you need to preserve files that have been deleted or overwritten,
it's often sufficient to select Recycle bin in synchronization
settings. However, this is only available for local drives and offers
little control on how to store and how long to keep the files.
FreeFileSync therefore has an additional option, Versioning.
In synchronization settings, set deletion handling to Versioning and naming convention to
Replace. Deleted files will be moved to the specified folder
without any decoration and will replace already existing older
versions.
Set deletion handling to Versioning and naming convention to Time stamp [File]. FreeFileSync will move deleted files into the provided folder and add a time stamp to each file name. The structure of the synchronized folders is preserved so that old versions of a file can be conveniently accessed via a file browser.
Example: Last versions of the file Folder\File.txt inside folder D:\Revisions
With naming convention Time stamp [Folder] files are moved into a time-stamped subfolder of the versioning folder while their names remain unchanged. This makes it easy to manually undo a synchronization by moving the deleted files from the versioning folder back to their original folders.
Example: Last versions of the file Folder\File.txt inside folder D:\Revisions
With naming convention Replace it is possible to refine the granularity of versions to keep by adding Macros to the versioning folder path. For example, you can save deleted files on a daily basis by adding the %date% macro:
Example: Last versions of the file Folder\File.txt inside folder D:\Revisions\%date%