Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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I have Vista Ultimate running at home on our family iMac. If I were a consumer I would make sure this was the version of Vista my machine was running. Why? Because it has a feature called "volume shadow copy". Here is the description from a Microsoft site:
Have you ever accidentally saved over a file you were working on? Accidental file deletion or modification is a common cause of data loss. Windows Vista includes another useful innovation to help you protect your data: Previous Versions. This feature automatically creates point-in-time copies of files as you work, so you can quickly and easily retrieve versions of a document you may have accidentally deleted.
Last week, I dumped a bunch of pictures and videos of our daughter Sarah from my wife's camera to our iMac. Later that week I decided to sync all our 11,000 photos from my home office machine to our iMac so my wife could tag them etc. Well in doing so I overwrote the contents of the Users\Public\Pictures folder where I had previously copied the pictures of Sarah. These were irreplaceable photos and videos of Sarah's first days and my wife would have killed me had I not remembered reading about the "Previous Versions" feature in Vista.
So what did I do? Well after I was done panicking, I right clicked on the Pictures folder, selected the Previous Versions tab, selected the Pictures folder version from the day before, clicked Open and copied the folder of pictures and videos over. I then copied that folder back to my home office machine to be automatically backed up to Carbonite. Eventually I will configure SyncToy to keep the two computers in sync or get a Home NAS server, but for now, disaster was averted.
I don't know about you, but this feature alone was worth the upgrade. If you are a consumer, this feature is only available in Vista Ultimate. It's also found in Business and Enterprise Editions.
Yeah, Ultimate is more expensive than Home Premium or the other editions, but it's Ultimate for a reason .