I am an organization freak: whatever the size of the hard drive you give me, there will always be some free space after I am done installing everything I need, all the files to do proper work, etc. I clean up things better than a vacuum cleaner, and sometimes faster: Ctrl-Del is my friend.
But a few weeks ago, I Ctrl-Deleted a folder with stuff I needed 5 minutes later. No big deal, I have a backup somewhere on the Internet. But I remembered about Previous Versions, a nice feature of Windows Vista.
Previous Versions just makes a silent backup of all the changes you make to all of the files on your system every time a restore point is created, and once per day. The backups are small, because only the differences between to revisions of each file is taken into account, and the space reserved on your hard drive for those backups is recycled when needed (Previous Versions uses the same space on your hard drive as System Restore).
Not only does this work for changes made to files, but also for changes made to folders (i.e. you can recover deleted files).
Of course, you will only be able to restore changes made on a given day (since the backups are made once per day), and they cannot be too old if many changes were made to your system (as the space gets recycled).
To get the previous versions of a file, right-click that file, select Restore previous versions. This will open the file properties, on the Previous Versions tab. You may do the same for a folder.
The list will show you the available versions neatly organized by date. You may then open the file or folder in the Windows Explorer on a given date (effectively going back in time), copy the previous version to another location, or simply click Restore... to immediately restore the file or folder to the state it was in on the selected date.
If you click Open, you can perform the usual Explorer tasks on that previous version.
If you contrast this with the Time Machine feature in Mac OS X Leopard, you will notice that it serves the same purpose. There are a number of differences though:
- Vista's Previous Versions is not meant to serve for backup, especially since the differences are stored on the same drive. For this, you have the Backup and Restore Center.
- Time Machine can only perform backups on an external drive, and each new version will take up as much space as the previous version. This means that the drive may fill up quite quickly if you back up large files that are subject to change often. It also means that if you are on the road with your laptop and you do not have your external hard drive with you, tough...
- Time Machine is much sexier than Previous Versions, and can work within tools that support it (whereas Previous Versions is only available within the Windows Explorer).
