If you are running Windows Vista Business or Ultimate, you probably know about the Volume Shadow service, which creates shadow copies of your files in places like My Documents.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, right-click on a folder or file in My Documents that’s been around for a while and go to Properties. There you should see a tab called Previous Versions.
The Volume Shadow Copy service automatically create copies of your documents (called shadow copies) when you edit or delete them. This is super useful if you type lots of papers or create lots of documents because you can easily revert back to a previous version of a document or restore a deleted document.
However, if you are running Windows Vista Home edition, you do not have access to this feature. By default, shadow copies are enabled for all versions of Vista, it’s just that the feature can only be accessed in Ultimate, Business, or Enterprise editions.
Using ShadowExplorer, though, you can access the shadow copies on your Home edition Vista machine. Once you install the program and run it, you should see something similar to this:
Now you can browse all the shadow copies created by the Volume Shadow Copy service. When you click on a folder, all of the files will pop up in the right hand pane.
You can also click on the drop down box and choose a different point-in-time shadow copy. Note that you will only see one version of a document at a time depending on which shadow copy you are viewing.
If you want to restore a previous version of a folder or file, you can right-click and choose Export. You can then go ahead and save the files to a different location.
Note that in order to work, you need Administrator privileges. If you get a blank screen when you run ShadowExplorer, just right-click on the desktop icon and choose Run as Administrator.
Also note that you need to have System Restore enabled for this to work. System Restore is what makes the shadow copies, so if you turned off system restore for a drive, you will not see any shadow copies.
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