Crossing? More user-friendly "shadow copy" in Windows 7

  

Document processing accounts for the majority of the computers we use, and sometimes we face such awkward situations: the hard-to-find documents do not meet the needs and have to go back to a state in the file modification process.

Does we need to copy a copy of this file before we can modify the file? Friends who are familiar with Word should know that Word has the ability to save file versions. But the drawbacks of this feature are obvious, not only will the copy of the tie file take up a lot of disk space, and if it is a non-Word file (such as a picture) then it can do nothing. At this time, we can use the shadow copy function. By using this function, each time the restore point is created, the system creates a shadow copy of all the files saved on the hard disk partition with System Restore enabled. This way we can restore files with a specific restore point when needed.

In fact, shadow copies are not available in Windows 7, and it has been around since Vista. However, in Windows 7, the shadow copy feature has been greatly improved and more user-friendly. The performance is that shadow copies in Vista are related to system restores, that is, if you want to use a shadow copy in a partition, you must restore the system in that partition. The drawbacks of this kind of processing are obvious. Usually we save the data file in a non-system partition. In order to use the shadow copy function, we must enable the system restore function of the partition, and the waste of disk space is self-evident. Separation of these two features in Windows 7, so that we have the choice, enable system restore or shadow copy as needed. In Windows 7, only the system disk has both system restore and shadow copy enabled. For other partitions, if you want to use a shadow copy, you can manually enable the shadow copy function of the partition.

Enable a shadow copy of a partition by doing this: Right-click the Computer icon on the desktop and select Properties to open the System Properties window. Click the System Protection link on the left side of the window to open the System Protection Options page of the System Properties dialog box, where all local disk partitions are listed. If you want to enable the shadow copy feature for a partition, first select the partition and click the Configure button to open the configuration dialog. There are three options under "Restore Settings". Selecting the first item "Restore System Settings and Previous Version Files" will also enable the system restore and shadow copy function of the partition; select the second item "Restore only the previous version of the file" "Only the shadow copy feature of the partition will be enabled; the third "Turn off system protection" will close the system restore and shadow copy of the partition. We choose the second item and then drag the slider under Disk Space Usage to adjust the maximum disk space used by the shadow copy. Clicking the "Delete" button will delete all restore points.

After setting, when we edit the document in the partition, the system will automatically create a shadow copy of the folder in the background, each time creating a different shadow copy. When we want to restore the file to a previous state, just right click on the document (or the partition) and select "Properties" to open its properties dialog. Under the "Previous Versions" tab, I can see Seeing all the modified records for this document, a shadow copy is automatically created for each modification of the system, with a detailed time record. We select a point in time, click the "Open" button to view the status of the file at the moment, click "Copy" to copy the file in this state to a certain location, click "Restore" to replace the current file with the current state of the file . It can be seen that with the shadow copy we can not only make the current file back to a certain point in time, but also can view the previous state of the file at will.

It should be noted that a file will have a shadow copy of multiple points in time, but the shadow copy is different from the copy of the file we usually copy. A copy of a file in the general sense is exactly the same as the file, taking up the same amount of disk space. Unlike a shadow copy, it only records the modification information for that file, similar to what we usually call an incremental backup. Therefore, it does not take up much disk space.

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