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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Microsoft Windows Vista Help DeskMicrosoft Windows Vista Help Desk

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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Microsoft Windows Vista Help DeskMicrosoft Windows Vista Help Desk

Learn More Buy

Shadow Copy: New File Recovery Feature

One of the new features in Vista is kind of like a mini time machine for single files. You can revert any file to the way it was in the past using a previously saved version, which is preserved by Vista (and uses technology from the System Restore feature).

NOTE

Shadow Copy is available only in Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions of Vista.

This is handy if you accidentally overwrite a file's data with new data. Perhaps you were updating numbers in a spreadsheet, and you imported and saved data from a previous month by mistake, overwriting the data that was there.

Or maybe you were writing a report and the cat jumped up on the keyboard and somehow deleted a huge section of the file.

NOTE

Chris Niswander of BitBoost.com created a cat protection software product called PawSense after Deimos (a cat, not the demigod) crashed his sister's computer.

In either of these cases, you could revert to a version from yesterday or last week to recover a previous version of the file.

This would have been really useful when I was in college. There were a few times when I accidentally blew away essays and wished I could roll back the clock and get the data back.

  1. To restore a shadow copy, right-click on any file you have created and choose Restore Previous Versions (see Figure 9.4).
    Figure 9.4

    Figure 9.4 Restore your files to a previously saved version by right-clicking on it and choosing Restore Previous Versions.

  2. You'll see a list of all the saved versions of the file.
  3. Choose a version of the file you want to recover and click the Restore button (see Figure 9.5).
    Figure 9.5

    Figure 9.5 Choose a previous version of a file using the Shadow Copy feature and click to restore it.

  4. The file will be restored to the way it was in that version.

    NOTE

    The Shadow Copy feature doesn't store every version of the file ever created. To conserve space, it stores only the differential data—that is, the part of the file that has changed from the previous version it has on file.

CAUTION

If you copy a file from one computer to another or receive it from another person, the file leaves its shadow copies behind. They are not transferred with the file. Of course, Shadow Copy can also be a potential privacy issue. Old files that have been overwritten can be recovered, so a snoop can see earlier versions of your work. To clean up Shadow Copy data, you'll need to delete your old restore points. To do this:

  1. Click the Windows button and then type Disk Cleanup. Click it when it appears.
  2. Click More Options.
  3. Click the Clean Up button under System Restore and Shadow Copies.

This will also delete older images created by Windows Complete PC, so be careful with this powerful feature.

Spy on Shadow Copy

If you are worried that Shadow Copy uses too much storage space, use the vssadmin command:

  1. Open a command prompt by typing cmd in the Start menu Search box.
  2. Right-click on cmd when it appears in the Start menu and choose Run As Administrator.
  3. When the command window opens, at the prompt type vssadmin list to see a list of commands. Type vssadmin list ShadowStorage to see how much space is used by Shadow Copy.
  4. To change how much space is used, use this command: 
    vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive letter]
/For=[drive letter] /Maxsize=[here add the maximum size]
    For example: 
    vssadmin resize shadowstorage /On=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=10GB"

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