I was bumbling around some file preferences and discovered something in the right-click menu labeled as “Restore Previous Version.” I click it, and it opened a Previous Versions tab of the file properties window. In this tab, I see a dated list of every modification I’ve made to this file with the option to restore it to that point. The “location” column labeled each previous version as a “Shadow Copy.”

I googled

In a dumbed down sort of way, this is essentially a version control on your filesystem. All of it. It works just like you would expect it to: If you open a file make some edits and save it, then it will mark the incremental changes and save those. It doesn’t create a backup of the entire new file, it just records what you changed. You can restore a file to a previous version, or actually restore entire folders. If you were to accidentally delete a file or folder, you can go to the Previous Versions tool for the folder where it used to be located and revert to a previous version of the entire folder to get it back. From what I can see in some of my files’ previous version lists, it seems to do a pretty good job of automatically taking a snapshot after every edit, although I’d imaging that it technically doesn’t do that.

There’s a lot of information floating around the tubes about this feature, if you’re interested you should research it a bit more yourself. I keep coming across these awesome little bits of incredibly useful features. Vista grows on me more and more every day.

That being said, given all of these Shadow Copies infesting my file system, I’m glad my computer doesn’t have immature ninja tendencies. All of my file backups would turn into porn.