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When I'm working with a Graphics App, I press CTRL+S a lot to Quicksave. Sometimes, I just went too far and made a bad decision, sometimes to the point Undo wouldn't help either.

I would love to retain old versions of a file. Normally, Source Control would be of use here, but that's a manual process (same as just making some copies).

I wonder if there is an automatic way to do that? Everytime the file changes, keep a backup. I believe that in Windows Server, Shadow Copies can do that. When I check in my Windows 7 (Ultimate), I do see "Previous Versions" as a tab, but that seems to be part of the backup function which is once again manual.

Is there a way to get that type of automatic versioning?

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4 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Try using DropBox is mostly a service of online storage, but it keeps snapshots of every saved change in your Dropbox folder over the last 30 days.

More info here: https://www.dropbox.com/help/11

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I'm actually using Dropbox already, never realized it does versioning as well, thanks! –  Michael Stum Mar 13 '10 at 17:30
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Windows shadow copies are automatic; go to System Properties => System Protection and make sure protection is enabled on your drive. Normally it's tied to System Restore but if you go to "Configure..." you can set it to only manage versions of files and not system state. You can also configure how much space to allocate.

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That doesn't seem to work for me. I've enabled it for the drive, but it seems that I still have to manually create a Restore Point for these files to be picked up :/ –  Michael Stum Mar 13 '10 at 17:32
Can you open Task Scheduler, go to \Microsoft\Windows\SystemRestore and see if there is an "SR" task there? That is what normally runs the automatic restore point creation. If it is there, check the history and see why it's not running. Note that if you have System Restore turned on it should also make restore points when installing software. –  Mark Sowul Mar 13 '10 at 18:58
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Also, if you're using Adobe flavour of graphic software, they have something called version cue which is basically a version control system for graphic files. Verson Control on adobe.com

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The best of the best:

  • MOGWare. FileHamster


Good luck!

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