Windows Vista come with a wonderful feature called “Previous Versions” that does a periodic backup of all your files. For as long as I’ve used Windows Vista, I never managed to get “Previous Versions” to work. Now, before I start, one of the first few things after I installed Windows (98, XP, Vista, whatever) is to optimise them. One of the many ways to optimise a Windows is to turn off services that I thought unnecessary, and this case is one of example when I turned off services that was necessary for certain feature to work, but which I thought unnecessary. To figure it out, I read lots of forums, I even emailed some representatives from Microsoft to no avail. Finally, today I really put myself into the mood to solve this issue. After much trial and error, restarting my machine countless times, I finally found out two things.
First, it needs Server service to display Previous Versions UI, go figure. Server service supports file, print, and named-pipe sharing over the network for this computer. When I read that, I thought “I don’t need any sharing as I’m at home. Fine, I can turn that off.” Wrong. With Server service turned off, this is what you’ll get when you navigate to Previous Versions tab.
Fine, after I figured that out, I turned on Server service, I got the UI working now, but still it said that there are no previous versions available. This can’t be right.
I modified Documents folder virtually every single day, so there has to be backups. As it turns out, in order to be able to find Previous Versions backup, Vista needs TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service. This service description says “Provides support for the NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NetBT) service and NetBIOS name resolution for clients on the network, therefore enabling users to share files, print, and log on to the network” I don’t use sharing, I don’t use NetBIOS. Fine, I’ll turned it off. It was one of the many services that I thought unnecessary, thus turned off. Unknowingly to me, this is the services that allows Previous Versions backups to be found.
When I turned on TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service, immediately my backups are there. Gosh !! What does sharing and network level service has to do with backups? Anyway, managed to resolve it, and now I could see that I have TONS of backups of my files, some as old as September 2007, which is good to know.
Browsing old copies of files is easy. Click on the date that you want, and Open it.
There, you’ll see all your files as it was on that day. Now, Mac fans will say that the feature is there in Leopard in the form of Time Machine. Yeah, it’s the same concept. And don’t start on who-copy-who, shall we?
If you happen to own Windows Vista Business or Ultimate on your machine, Previous Versions feature should have been enabled by default. It’s a priceless feature, one that you think you’ll never need but you’ll be grateful it’s there when you accidentally deleted or replaced important files in your machine, or when virus strikes. Of course, as the backups are local, it doesn’t help in the event of disaster or hard-drive crash. To do that, I highly recommend you get an external hard drive, which are cheap now.
