Microsoft Monday
Apple touts their Time Machine feature in OS X as a breakthrough automatic backup system, but they’re not the only ones that offer such a thing. Believe it or not, Windows Vista has a feature that is much like Time Machine, except I’d like to think that it’s better. I’ll explain…
–Apple’s Time Machine Defined–
Since we are going to be explaining how Vista can do exactly what Time Machine can, I thought we should start by explaining what Time Machine is for those of you who are unfamiliar. Apple defines it as:
Time Machine is the breakthrough automatic backup that’s built right into Mac OS X. It keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac — digital photos, music, movies, TV shows, and documents. Now, if you ever have the need, you can easily go back in time to recover anything.
The big downside here is that you have to have an external drive connected to your Mac to be able to use this feature. Once you have the external drive connected, it will do it automatically for you.
Vista’s Previous Versions Feature
We’ve mentioned little known features in Vista before before, and there are several. One of them is “Previous Versions” which essentially does what Time Machine does on a Mac except you don’t need an external hard drive connected. That’s what makes it great! The only thing it’s missing is a snazzy interface. It’s a bare-bones feature, and creating a easy-on-the-eyes interface clearly wasn’t a top priority for Microsoft like it was for Apple. Additionally, keep in mind that this feature is available only in Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise versions of Vista.
Previous Versions are accessed by right clicking on any document or folder (yes, even whole folders are backed-up) and then clicking on “Restore Previous Versions.” Previous versions come from shadow copies, which are saved automatically to your hard drive. If you need a refresher on what a shadow copy is, reference this article.
A list of archived copies will be displayed in the “Previous Versions” tab, and they’re all sorted by date. Remember, these were all done automatically — without the need of an external drive. Retrieving the archived copies is simple, and you have a few different options for doing so. They include:
- Copy – copy the entire folder and paste it on your desktop or wherever else you’d like to
- Browse – Open the folder to see what’s in it
- Restore – This will replace any existing copy that you have on your computer.
This feature is perfect for any files or folders you may have accidentally deleted or changed. Below you’ll see a screenshot of the “Previous Versions” tab for a folder on my computer containing music from the B-52’s:
Backup and Restore Center
While the Previous Versions feature is great, there are other options included with Vista that will help you keep backup files and restore them if necessary. To access the Backup and Restore Center, click on the start menu and type “Backup and Restore Center” into the search box and hit enter.
Depending on the version of Vista that you have, you can do various things in the Backup and Restore Center. One of the nicest features is the option to “Back up files.” Like Time Machine, this does require an external drive of some sort whether it be a hard drive, USB drive, or an optical drive. Clicking on it will pull up a box where you can choose which files types you want to backup. The screenshot below shows you what this looks like:
Once you select the types of files you want backed-up, you can decide how often you want a backup created as shown below:
For those of you running Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise editions, you can do the following:
- Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore – this is a comprehensive, image-based backup tool that will “help you out of a tight spot if you need to recover your entire system.” It can be accessed from inside Windows Vista- or even from the Windows Vista installation CD should your computer have issues with starting up normally
Wrapping it up
To me, the Previous Versions Feature is something that Microsoft should have offered with Vista Home Premium. Because they don’t offer it with Home Premium, they should at least talk it up as an incentive for buying Ultimate because it’s a great feature to have. What I like about it best is that you do not need an external hard drive connected (like Apple’s Time Machine) to make use of it.
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Tags: CyberNotes, Software, Windows
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In my opinion, putting these features head to head isn’t a fair comparison seeing that the feature is limited to half the available versions of Vista. It’s like you’re saying, “Hey! Vista beats Apple in this feature”. But can you show me it on my Vista version? Ummmmmm, catch my drift?
That’s the problem with Microsoft…depending on which version of Windows I have, I may have “Previous Versions”. Also, what I can do with “Back up and Restore” depends on which version of Vista I have.
Microsoft really went down the wrong path with all the various version of Vista.
The issue here is not what feature there is, or isn’t. We’ve had system restore, which is a bare-bones version of a bare-bones Previous versions, with people having to create restore points manually, and it’s system-wide, not file specific.
The issue here is that you need to make a feature usable by the common user to make it effective. Time Machine does that. It might not be ‘revolutionary’, but it reaches out to the common person … and in that way, it gets the job done.
The very fact that you’re writing a whole article showing what ‘Previous versions’ is shows where it has failed as a feature. This is of course not taking away the usefulness.
Aditya
Not a correct comparison. System Restore does not work on user files, only system files and settings. If you accidently delete a Word document, you cannot do a System Restore to bring it back.
But I do agree with your main issue. Apple does beat MS on this issue, because it is useful to everyone. Even though Vista technically has it beat with Previous Versions and Backup and Restore, it should be available on all versions.
The only thing I have to say here about the MAC feature is that in the MAC ad, Apple is saying they are the only ones that have that type feature. To me that is blatant outright lying.
The other comment I have is that the Previous Versions in Vista appears to only work on the drive that Vista is installed on and not other drives in the computer. Unless there is a manual way to enable it on other drives.
Not to mention that the theory behind backing up files is to be able to recover from a disaster like a hard crash. If you back them up to the same hard drive you have the master copies (to call them something), and it goes boom, you’ll end up with nothing!
I guess Previous Versions is usable with an external hard drive, otherwise it’s much better to use a separate backup utility. Maybe the same Time Machine if you have a Mac
You know this would work better with a server to host the shadow copies, which is probably why the feature is available in the versions of Vista aimed at business use.
Also, for home users Windows Home Server has some pretty nice features for keeping backups and works with all sorts of hard drive configurations. But of course that requires another computer, but now days who does not have an older machine floating around that could be used as a home server. In that case I think it would be as good as or better than Time machine, just in a different way.
There’s a commercial app for Windows and Mac called “Versomatic” that tracks every change made to every files on a HDD and it is similar to Time Machine in that you can select where you want to back up..same HDD or external and set it and forget it, no manual backups AND the backups are accessible from the right-click/context menu. But it doesn’t save disk space like Vista’s Shadow Copy does.
just for the heads up, linux has its own time machine called FlyBack.
soon it will have a fancy interface but so far it works like a charm. I tried it on Ubuntu.
You’ll have to go into the system settings and enable system restore for each of the drives for it to work.
Huh, that didn’t take long at all.
I used to use a tool called GoBack that did the same kind of thing. I stopped using it because it’s so heavy on processor and disk usage.
That would be nice for businesses, but overall I like the fact that I don’t have to setup another computer or hard drive to do the dirty work. It’s just always doing its thing.
I see what you’re saying, but it is a feature that is still included with half the versions of Vista.
That’d b cool if it was in a version of Vista a standard user would have, like Home Premium. Sounds like a good feature, but isn’t worth the OS cost difference.
Great pointer. I think if MS had integrated previous versions into every file dialog/file manager and advertised it, they’d have reached more people. Be honest, though, for your typical computer challenged pleb (aka typical Mac customer) they can only grasp things they are shown..and let’s face it: Mac is king of making things dumbed down enough to understand. Who can’t figure out scrolling through historic pictures of history with a timeline on the side. Microsoft could learn a LOT from the designers at Mac.
Microsoft still designs for the engineer in all of us…and Mac still designs for the artist. Unfortunately for Microsoft, “new” pc users (young AND old) almost always relate better to artists than engineers. It’s a mindset change.
“Microsoft still designs for the engineer in all of us”
Well, I’m a researcher with a PhD in computer engineering and I guess I’m one of the minority of engineers that don’t like fighting with our computers (aka troubleshooting) or leaving our work at the mercy of viruses and spyware. And yes, even if you have all the latest tools and are careful which sites you visit and what attachments you open, it CAN happen!
Almost all computer researchers and professionals I know either use MacOS or Linux and only have windows for compatibility reasons or some very specific programs. Granted, support for businesses and organizations is limited by apple and most linux distros and windows will still be the dominant OS in offices for quite some time.
But MS certainly doesn’t design for the engineer! They don’t even design for the poor admins! They design for the managers ordering equipment and probably some lame PC hobbyist that feels proud to have wasted a couple of hours fixing the latest quirk of their computer.
Check out Genie Timeline
[genietimeline.com]
Seems like a very promising solution for an equivalent solution to Time Machine for Windows