No Panic Computing in the News

It has happened to all of us at some time or another. You save and close that big document that you have been working on, locking in the modifications that you just made and overwriting the original. The problem is the next day you don’t like the changes. You need the original document, but now it’s gone. This has happened to me more often than I would like to admit.

Normally you are out of luck and need to reconstruct the earlier version step-by-step.

Fortunately you have a No Panic Computing notebook. Your files are automatically backed up in redundant, secure, off-site data centers run by Iron Mountain. The backup even has an automatic versioning system allowing you to restore older copies of the same document. All backed up versions of files are kept for 90 days for you, even if you delete or overwrite them.

File recovery is easy

Here’s how to recover the older version of that file from the Iron Mountain data center.

1. First click the little icon that looks like a shield located in the system tray (or bottom right corner of the computer screen) -- the icon will say “NPC DataGuard Agent” when you roll your cursor over it.
2. Then click the button “Retrieve” on the left hand side of the agent screen.
3. There is a box in the toolbar called “Show Versions” that has a drop down menu.  Click the drop down menu and select “All” Navigate in the browsing menu to the file that you accidentally overwrote and find the previous version of that file. Select that file by clicking that file’s check box.
4. Now you have selected the file that you want to retrieve.  Click the orange button “Retrieve” located in the bottom right corner and save it.

That's it! The file will re-appear in its original folder on your computer. The day is saved again!