Can a leotard change its spots?
OUR RECENT examination of the 'undelete' technology in Windows Vista has become more important since Apple formally announced '
Time Machine' in Leopard, the next iteration of OSX.
Unfortunately Apple's Time Machine requires a separate disk, dedicated to the backing-up of data on your primary drive. Useful in the case of a hard-disk failure, but not exactly the cheapest option. It also seems to have an esoteric GUI, which may or may not work well in real-word usage. Windows Vista's alternative backup application is very similar, albeit without the over-the-top interface, and also comes with a Shadow Copy feature that's integrated into the normal file/folder menus, and has some interesting attributes of its own.
The Inquirer recently spoke to Dan Stevenson, Lead Program Manager from Microsoft's 'Windows Storage and File Systems Team', who is currently working on applications related to backup and data-restoration on Windows Vista.
Dan stated that the Shadow Copy feature in Vista doesn't create a completely new file every time a change is made, it only creates a backup of changes using a driver that tracks changes at the block level across the entire disk volume using a copy-on-write mechanism. These changes are captured in discrete shadow copies or 'snapshots', which are created more or less once a day. The total size taken up by the shadow copies is capped at 15% of the disk size - this will normally give you a month or so worth of shadow copies, depending on your I/O profile.
Shadow copies are tied in with the more standard backup application that is included with Vista. Within the user interface for the restoration of previous versions, manual or scheduled full-backup entries will be listed, allowing for a comprehensive unified interface for all your Vista data retrieval needs.
The Vista backup application proper, is a more standard block-level backup/restore program for complete disaster recovery. It performs incremental/differential backups to a hard disk, similar to Leopard's Time Machine, so that it only backs up the changed blocks - but each backup is functionally a complete full backup. As a bonus, the format is VHD, which lets you mount (but not boot) the backup images in VPC/VS. All of this is integrated into a standard Windows control panel entry, and the Windows Recovery Environment, which now includes the System Restore feature (...which also incorporates the new Shadow Copy/backup tech). For further information, the team's bog can be read
here.
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