Section 22.4. Shadow Copies: Business Enterprise Ultimate Edition

22.4. Shadow Copies: Business ¢ Enterprise ¢ Ultimate Edition

System Restore is an amazing, powerful, career-saving featurebut it's awfully self-interested. It cares only about protecting Windows .

How can you rewind your documents to their earlier, healthier, or pre-edited conditions?

The Shadow knows ...Shadow Copy, that is.

The new Vista feature called Shadow Copy is a time machine for documents in the same way System Restore is a time machine for your system software. It's an incredible safety net against damage, accidental modification, or late-night bouts of ill-advised editing.

UP TO SPEED
What Shadow Copies Aren't

The Shadow Copy feature isn't a substitute for backing up your computer. For example, this feature won't help you if you deleted a document, because it's designed only to give you previous versions of existing documents. It's also no protection against hard drive death, since shadow copies are usually stored on the same hard drive as the originals . See page 641 for details on making proper backups .

Shadow copies also aren't the same as an infinite Undo command. Copies are made only once a day, so you can't, for example, rewind a document to the state it was in three hours ago.

22.4.1. Making Shadow Copies

The beauty of Shadow Copy is that it's automatic and invisible. It's part of System Restore, actually, meaning that unless you've turned System Restore off , Shadow Copy is protecting your documents, too. To save time and disk space, Shadow Copy only bothers copying files that have changed since the last Restore Point was created.

22.4.2. Recovering Old Document Versions

If the worst should happen, and you realize that you really preferred the draft of your novel that you had three revisions ago, right-click the file or folder in question. From the shortcut menu, choose Restore Previous Version.

The Previous Versions tab of the Properties dialog box opens (Figure 22-8), complete with a list of all the shadow copies of the file. Select the file you want to restore.

Figure 22-8. Older versions of a file are listed on the Previous Versions tab. Before restoring a file, it's a good idea to open it first and preview it, to make sure you do want to use that version instead of the current one. For absolute safety, click Copy; the screen on the right appears, letting you save a copy of the file in a different folder .

Now, you could just click Restore; that would certainly do the trick. Trouble is, this is a permanent maneuver, so once you restore a document to the Tuesday version, today's more recent draft is gone forever.

Therefore, it's a good idea to play it safer using one of these techniques:

• Highlight the file; click Open. The document opens on the screen so you can make sure this is the version you wanted.

• Select the file and click Copy. A dialog box appears so you can peel off a copy of the older document instead of nuking the modern one.

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  Note: Here's a warning to anyone who dual-boots between Vista and Windows XP (page 623): for some extremely technical and extremely unfortunate reasons, starting up in Windows XP deletes all of your shadow copies and restore points ( and all Complete PC backups, described later in this chapter, except for the most recent one).The only workaround is to turn off the hard drive that contains these files before starting up in Windows XP. Microsoft is very sorry.

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