Previous Versions

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).

Vista's bad press

My previous post could have been interpreted as me bashing Vista. Let me make this clear: I like Vista a lot, much more than XP. It is especially nice with Service Pack 1, but was fine even before.

In moving to Vista, Microsoft obviously tried to sometimes hide features used by power users (which is fine by me). However, they sometimes got it wrong, and it is not always obvious to tell where things are.

This was already the case for a few things in XP; well, in Vista this is sometimes better, sometimes worse. The UI inconsistencies (remnants from Windows 95 and XP, mixed with the new UI that Vista introduced) certainly do not help.

Instead of making some of the powerful and useful features of the system easily discoverable, they just get relegated to some tab in a dialog (yes, I am again thinking of Previous Versions).

It turns out that if you look at it a bit too quickly, Vista just seems to be XP with a more modern theme and too high requirements to warrant installing.

Could this be one of the reasons it gets such bad press?

Get ready: a few forthcoming posts will try to show you some nice features of Vista.

The most unobvious UI?

More often than not, after some time spent using Windows Vista, you will notice that it provides many features of other OSes, sometimes even more powerful. However they happen to be difficult to discover, or downright hidden (on purpose?).

One feature that comes immediately to mind is Previous Revisions (based on the Shadow Copy service), which in some ways may be compared to Mac OS X Leopard Time Machine. We will get back to that greatly undervalued feature of Windows Vista in a future post.

But here is (so far) the most hidden piece of UI I have seen in Windows Vista. It is so unobvious that I even thought that the feature that previously was available in Windows XP had actually been removed (in XP it was already kind of unobvious already); the feature in question is the Virtual Private Network (VPN) server.

Actually, not that many people know that it is possible to define an incoming connection in Windows XP that uses the PPTP protocol (port 1723). Other computers may then connect to that VPN securely over the Internet (for example, using the built-in PPTP client built into Windows XP or Vista).

So this is how you create a new incoming VPN connection in Vista:

• Go to the Network and Sharing Center
• Click Manage network connections

Now, this is where it should have been obvious. Look at the list of network connections, and at the list of available options. Do you see it?

No.

But it is right there. What you have to do is hit the Alt key to make the menu bar appear (it is hidden by default), and then open the File menu. Do you see it now?

• Click File / New Incoming Connection...

 and there you go! What is really bad in this is that:

1. it should really be possible to create a new incoming connection by clicking Set up a connection or network in the Network and Sharing Center
2. the command to create a new incoming connection should not (only) be a menu item, but should also be available as a text link or a toolbar button.

Why did they hide it so well?

VS 2005 really wants that update

September 11th, 2007. Go to Windows Update. Install all updates. All updates install successfully. Go back to Windows Update. You will still see "Security Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (KB937061)". Install the update. It installs successfully. Go back to Windows Update. You will still see "Security Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (KB937061)". etc. etc.
You don't need to watch Groundhog Day again.

[Update] See this thread on the Microsoft VS forum. No solution to this yet, except for installing CrystalReports.

[Update 2] September 14th. Microsoft has now fixed the issue.