Get Shadow Copy Feature In Home Basic & Premium Editions

Posted November 23, 2008 – 10:11 am in: Freeware, Softwares, Uncategorized, Vista Tweaks, Windows 7, Windows 7 Tweaks

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Perhaps you have tried accessing this feature in Vista Home Premium in the past, but with no success. The common Vista version we can see is Home Premium. As many of you know, Premium version has most of our basic features but lacks in some good features that are available only in higher editions of Vista like Enterprise and Ultimate.

Two features I like in Vista Ultimate are Group Policy editor and Windows Shadow Copy. Basically, these two features are present in all editions of Windows Vista but we can’t access them in lower Vista editions. I use basic Registry Editor instead of Group Policy but what about Windows Shadow Copy, the ultimate feature of Ultimate edition?

Definition of Windows Shadow Copy goes like this: Shadow copies are automatically saved as part of a restore point in System Properties. If System Protection is turned on, Windows automatically creates shadow copies of files that have been modified since the last restore point was made, which is typically once a day. If your hard disk is partitioned or if you have more than one hard disk on your computer, you need to turn on System Protection on the other partitions or hard disks.

Of course, we can’t upgrade our Edition to or Business or Ultimate just because of shadow copy feature. In fact, Vista creates the backup of modified files in all editions of Vista also but users don’t have the accessing permission.

The good way to come out of this burden is, installing a free, small and nifty tool called “Shadow Explorer”. Shadow explorer allows you access and browse the shadow copies created by the Windows Vista volume Shadow Copy Service. As I said earlier, this is really a small application to have with great feature. The options and features are not only straight forward but easy-to-use as well. The three features of Shadow

Explorer are:
*Shows available Shadow Copies
*Allows users to browse through Shadow Copies
*Retrieve versions of files and folders

Shadow Explorer installer size is around 600KB and hardly takes 2 MB hard disk space. Users can select any drive from the top left corner and also can see the dates of Shadow Copies. As this program is straight forward, there is nothing much to write about it. All I can say is a must have for Vista Home Basic and Premium edition users.

|Download Shadow Explorer|
P.S: Shadow Copy feature is available in Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate editions by default.

Tags: Vista, Windows 7, Windows Shadow copy

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