Windows Vista and Windows 7 (Business and Ultimate editions) come with a very cool feature called Shadow Copy. Here’s what Microsoft claims about the feature (we’ve modified their statement slightly to help you better understand).
Shadow Copy: Available in Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise editions of Windows Vista, this feature creates file copies as you work, so you can restore older versions of files or documents you may have accidentally deleted. Hidden copying is automatically enabled in Windows Vista and makes copies, on a schedule, of changed files. Since only incremental changes are saved, minimal disk space is used for hidden copies.
The thing is, even though hidden copies are only accessible to Ultimate, Business and Enterprise users, they are created in every variant of the OS i.e. in Basic or Home Premium. Today, we are going to introduce you to a great freeware, called ShadowExplorer, which will help you take advantage of this tolerance of Windows and access hidden copies of files regardless of the version of Windows you are using.
ShadowExplorer is a free tool for Windows that does what I said above and works on all versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7.
To make sure Windows is making hidden copies of your files, make sure that you have System Restore enabled. Since I mainly store all my important files in the system folder, I always enable protection settings for the specific drive to allocate it a reasonable amount of hard disk space to make hidden copies of files.
Download and install ShadowExplorer on your computer. Now, when you have a crisis and want to access shadow copy functionality to retrieve an older version of a file that you deleted or changed by mistake, run ShadowExplorer with administrative privileges.
This tool is very easy to use. After the program loads, you can see three drop-down controls at the top of the screen. Use the fist drop-down control to select the hard drive partition you want to access and select the timestamp in the second drop-down control. The third drop-down is used to change the view, but the default detail view is always recommended.
Windows will automatically create and remove the timestamps of hidden copies depending on the changes you make to the files and the hard drive space you have allocated to Protection settings.
Windows will display all files (including hidden files) along with their creation, last access, and modification dates. To restore any file, right click on it and select export.
Now, choose the location where you want to restore the file and click the OK button. The older version of the file will be instantly restored to the desired location saving you unnecessary trouble.
My judgment
This tool makes it easy to access hidden copies created by Windows and recover specific files from there. While I don’t recommend using it as a backup/restore tool, if you’re thinking of restoring your system using Windows’ built-in System Restore tool just to retrieve an older version of a file, then I suggest you try ShadowExplorer first.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
