Windows 11 can now rewind your whole PC, including the file you just created
https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-11-point-in-time-restore-feature/
I used to have a third-party thing that did basically that, except it also had a sort of journaling (not quite version control) for file.
It was occasionally a life saver, but over time between improving built-in tools, improving Windows stability (at least in my experience), switching to cloud backups and a few other things, I abandoned it.
I wonder how much of a performance hit this new thing causes, because that was always the issue with the third-party system I had. It definitely slowed things down.
> performance hit
I went and checked, it was on by default in my primary laptop. I guess it doesn't hurt performance much since I haven't noticed.
Agreed that it (hopefully) might not be of much use, but -then again- I've had some massive screw-ups over the years. I posted this so I might remember/find it if/when I screw up again.
Also might be handy in today's everything's vulnerable world.
My old system did backups at three levels
- roughly real-time journaling of changes. Differential saves (so think something like a git repo). When you did something really stupid, you could back up 15 minutes or an hour. I suspect most of the performance hit was this feature, but it was really handy when I was doing a lot of writing and might be doing big cut and paste and oooppps I lost the paste and then accidentally saved stuff. So with the restore plus Beyond Compare file compare, I could get myself out of my dumbest moments.
- periodic. This would be a differential save and then every few saves a full save. This might be daily or weekly. Differential saves can only be retrieved if you have the whole history, of course, so every X saves (settable), I would have it do a full save. These could be pretty resource intensive while happening too.
- archival full saves. Every six months or so.
So the idea was frequent saves, with some chance of issues because they were differential. Then stack those with full monthly saves. Archive, say, 6 monthly saves and delete the older ones. Then every six months, a full archival save. Then when you have a few of those, start deleting the oldest.
It had a good compression algo, so with a 2TB external drive, I could keep a 500GB drive backed up with a couple years worth of versions. That was enough to take me back in time, typically, to the early stages of a book. So if all the archived and dated folders went POOF (i.e. main HD failure), I could rewind at will.
I did it more than you might think. Not just for catastrophes.
Anyway... I've gotten lazy, but you raise a good point about the changing environment.
QuoteAnyway... I've gotten lazy, b
Me too.
A new PC recently, and I only had a 10 YEAR OLD copy of my music files..... loads lost. most of the important stuff saved.
One HD failed to spin up, a friend I gave a copy to had lost it, but I managed to drag a few files off the damaged HD with software. Its of far more value to me than the films I have. No idea why I managed not to back up properly, except I got lazy.