Comments

1. Korn1699

   
   Posted on: August 06, 2008 at 3:49PM

   I like the feature, although I have been having an issue with my system restore not working sometimes...  I dual boot Vista x64 Ultimate and Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop, but once in a while the boot sector gets erased or something...  It just tell me there is no bootable media, and has done this with 3 different drives.  I use Acronis, and recover the boot sector.  Vista thinks it is a new drive, and asks me to restart after it installs the "new" drive.  System restore doesn't work after that, unless I go to system restore through the welcome screen links, and turn it off for the old drive and on for the new one.  Once I create a new point it works, but it is annoying that I have to do that all the time...
2. dovella

   
   Posted on: August 06, 2008 at 4:50PM

   Nice Brandon,
3. Brick

   
   Posted on: August 06, 2008 at 4:54PM

   This feature is one of the best things about Vista over XP.  It's great being able to restore accidently deleted stuff and since it works at block level using the VSS, you can get back files that are usually opened (e.g. Outlook data files).

   It really makes the road warrior experience much safer.
4. chakkaradeep

   
   Posted on: August 06, 2008 at 5:02PM

   This has been my favorite feature and I use it often along with the System Restore functionality (when problems occur ;) )
5. Islander

   
   Posted on: August 06, 2008 at 5:12PM

   Indeed an amazing feature. But isn't it only available with Vista Ultimate, Business and Enterprise editions?
6. logic_earth

   
   Posted on: August 06, 2008 at 5:49PM

   Previous Versions interface in not Available in Windows Vista Home. However, versions of your files are stilling being made because Shadow Copy service is on all versions.

   You can use a third-party application Shadow Explorer for versions of Vista that do not have an interface.

   http://www.shadowexplorer.com/
7. caywen

   
   Posted on: August 06, 2008 at 7:27PM

   I had to turn it off because it was eating some 15GB on my 80GB HD. I found I was down to about 8GB free and wanted to free enough space for about 12GB for videos. I've since upgraded to a 250GB HD, but I fear turning it on and having it chew up 50GB of space.

   I much prefer to use a version control system to explicitly track versions of files that I actually care about. For me, using hosted SVN or CVS is way better since you can get your files on any machine anywhere.
8. chakkaradeep

   
   Posted on: August 07, 2008 at 6:17AM

   @caywen - svn or cvs is totally different from these things. Regarding space, I dont see it eating up a huge space in my machine.
9. Korn1699

   
   Posted on: August 07, 2008 at 8:47AM

   Is there a way to change the amount of space used for shadow copies?  I am assuming it uses a percent of the drive.  My problem on another computer is that I have two 300 GB VelociRaptor drives set up as RAID 0, but I am only using up about 100 GB, although the shadow copies are taking up 60 GB more.  I want to be able to do a backup to my external drive without having 60 extra GB it the file each time.
10. caywen

    
    Posted on: August 07, 2008 at 12:59PM

    chakkaradeep,

    What is totally different about version control and previous versions? I understand the UE is different, but they both allow you to recover old versions. It's just that SVN is manual, but you get much more power over what you manually check-in.

    Also, seeing that it does not eat huge space on your machine, how about you lend me 15GB of space? :-)
11. Sarah

    
    Posted on: August 07, 2008 at 1:03PM

    Help! How do I set the shadow copy drive space limit? It's using 40+ Gig from my 200 Gig hard drive. The only help I can find on the Internet is to turn it off, then back on. That would wipe out all my current previous versions and still use a minimum of 15% of my drive space (30 GB). I do not need to use that much space (I only have a few GB of files), but no matter what I do between the Shadow Services and the Indexing, my drive is filling up with Gigs of data. After about 7 months of use, I'd say that Vista is using 30+ Gigs more than my previous XP machine. I'm not doing anything more than I did before, so I think that's nuts.

    Any ideas?
12. caywen

    
    Posted on: August 07, 2008 at 3:00PM

    Shadow Copies was "only" chewing up 15gb on my box, but these reports of it chewing up 40-50gb are alarming.

    Isn't there a better way to do this, MS?
13. Quikboy

    
    Posted on: August 07, 2008 at 5:25PM

    Hey, that's a pretty good video! I wasn't aware of that. It looks like a really easy and useful feature.

    I'm guessing there's no simple built-in XP, is there? :^(

    They should put these on the Windows.com site. Esther does a pretty good job of explaining and showing features.
14. Eric F

    
    Posted on: August 07, 2008 at 5:42PM

    The VSSAdmin command-line utility can be used to limit the amount of storage that can be used for Volume Shadow Copies.

    See http://www.realtime-vista.com/administration/2007/07/resizing_volume_shadow_service.htm
15. someone

    
    Posted on: August 07, 2008 at 5:57PM

    A really powerful features crippled by System Restore from XP and Vista. Why the hell does MS not modify XP so dual boot scenarios are not affected is beyond me. Already, Vista's market share is close to 15%, added to that is the fact that Previous Versions is only included in Business, Enterprise and Ultimate, and then there are users who've Vista but dual-boot between XP. So the actual number of users who'll end up using this powerful and useful feature will be very less, if MS's storage team modified XP so it doesn't delete Windows Vista and later OSes' shadow copies/restore points and vice versa, then Previous Versions will have real potential.
16. Allan

    
    Posted on: August 07, 2008 at 6:10PM

    I have Previous version but i can't use it because it's blank. When i need to use it i don't see anything it's blank. Sometimes the content will show up when it feel like it. I did the KB thing below but did not work. I'm stuck with blank previous version. I also post this issue in Vista newsgroup no help. Maybe WEI will see this problem and report it.

    "Folder versions" list is blank, or you receive a message on Windows Vista: "There are no previous versions available"

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937862/en-us
17. chakkaradeep

    
    Posted on: August 07, 2008 at 6:12PM

    @caywen, instead of me lending you 15GB of space, why dont you try @Eric F's suggestion to limit the size utilized by the Volume Shadow Service :)
18. logic_earth

    
    Posted on: August 09, 2008 at 8:00PM

    @Allan

    Maybe this will help you.

    http://logicearth.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/vista-previous-versions/