That is what the current Giveaway of the Day program lets you do.

I [...]]]> Have you ever wanted to go back to a previous version of your work?  Maybe you closed the program and now wish you could backup to a point you had saved when you worked on it a couple of days ago?

That is what the current Giveaway of the Day program lets you do.

I was hesitant to download History Explorer at first, mainly because I am currently using my laptop and I did not want a lot of backup files cluttering my computer, however, I took a chance because I can see where the program could be very useful in my writing.

I was very happy to discover that the program lets me pick what I have it backup.  When I first started it the program gave me the option to add my “My Documents” folder and I told it to “Skip” that step.  I spent a few minutes familiarizing myself with the program after that, and it took a bit to figure out how to add folders (you click the Yellow Star with the green plus sign on it – you’ll see this between the yellow folder with the up arrow and the address of the folders when you do not have a folder you are viewing in your backups).

I also found where I can add what type of files I want the program to save:

Tools > Settings
Tab = Include File Types

Select “Other file types” and enter the one you want to add in the small box to the right. I entered .yw5 and clicked “add”, now my backup will backup all of my yWriter5 files as well.

You can see if the program already makes backups for your program by clicking “Show Me” beside the file types. This opens a small popup window that lets you scroll and see what file extensions are backed up.

Taking a brief tour of what I have discovered so far…

You can also set the maximum size of your database, the maximum size of files (files larger than you set will not be backed up), and calculate your current database size. You can clean it up, in which case History Explorer says it will automatically determine which files to delete and you can run cleanup multiple times to clean up more and more space.

Under the View tab you can choose to see only files that your backing up, or all of the files on your computer (great for locating the folders you want to backup when you are not having it auto backup them), you can also view deleted files and deleted version information.

Double clicking on the version or file name will open the project for you.  And you can view your backed up files by the hour, 6 hours, day, week, month, 3 months, year, 4 years and even 10 years.

One complaint is that the program opens back up in MyDocuments rather than in the folder of your choice, I wish I could set it to open where I need it most, but that’s not too bad of a flaw.A guy at Giveaway of the Day had said that the program would not run in the background, that you had to have it open when using it, however, I tried closing it and opening my novel – I then closed the novel and reopened History Explorer. I did this a few times and each time it had saved another backup of my novel.

If you are a writer and might need to refer back to older versions of your articles or novels then this is a program you really should take a look at History Explorer, particularly since for about the next 12 hours from publication of this post the program is free to visitors of Giveaway of the Day.