How the Magic of Windows Vista saved 38G of my data

re: How the Magic of Windows Vista saved 38G of my data

C Gomez — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 18:41:14 GMT

I find it hard to believe any person could claim to have found a bug related to every MSDN blog post he or she reads. I also think it's arrogant to believe "everyone" has to pay MSFT to report bugs.

Over the fourteen years I've written software for MSFT platforms, I've never had to pay when I've stumbled on a bug (a code bug or documentation bug). The MSDN incident was always promptly refunded or not charged (the old "free" incidents).

In modern Internet times, I haven't called once for support. The answers lurk on the library, the numerous blogs and other sources.

In the end, having such a contrasting experience, it makes it seem like the stories are just made up.

re: How the Magic of Windows Vista saved 38G of my data

Brandon Clinger — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 09:18:41 GMT

What do you do, with a BA in english.....

re: How the Magic of Windows Vista saved 38G of my data

Norman Diamond — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 04:17:42 GMT

I think I have to retract my previous comment. I think I was wrong. I no longer think I learned something from customers. If "Not Norman Diamond" and asdf were customers, they wouldn't have to hide their faces in shame. I think maybe I might have learned something from Microsoft employees, though I'm not sure if I learned anything new.

re: How the Magic of Windows Vista saved 38G of my data

Norman Diamond — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 03:20:28 GMT

Thanks to several commenters, now I understand why companies that made working software couldn't survive in the market. It's not only due to being crushed by the lower operating costs of companies that make non-working software, it's also because customers really prefer non-working software. No 6 degrees needed, 1 was enough. Thank you.

re: How the Magic of Windows Vista saved 38G of my data

asdf — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:28:29 GMT

@Not Norman Diamond: priceless :D

Lots of people are going to love this Vista feature - Restore Previous Versions.

Spyware Sucks — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 15:14:56 GMT

Have you ever accidentally deleted a file? Or overwritten a file accidentally and wanted the old version

re: How the Magic of Windows Vista saved 38G of my data

Not Norman Diamond — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:25:40 GMT

I propose we create a game. We will call it "Six degrees of Norman". The aim of the game is to take any MS blog post, and, using 6 links or less, find a way in which the post is somehow related to Norman losing data. Bonus points if Norman's data loss happened on Windows 95 with a SCSI floppy disk drive attached to a laptop. Extra bonus points if he had to pay 4200 yen to bring it to someone's attention. Even more points if it involves a confusion over the size of a 'character' (we do not specify what we mean by a 'character' to keep the game more interesting). And of course, maximum points if Norman paid 4200 yen to report losing data on a scsi floppy drive attached to a laptop running Win95, as a result of confusion over the size of a 'character' - especially if it's a "wont-fix"!

While the game probably won't stop Norman constantly moaning about his various experiences with Microsoft, it may mean that at the very least, there will finally be something useful that his whining posts can contribute.

(Norman doesnt qualify to play the game and win points because he has the unfair advantage of being able to take any blog post and turn it into his personal MS bug database. Not all of us are that skilled.)

re: How the Magic of Windows Vista saved 38G of my data

Lorenzo — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:21:05 GMT

Wow. I mean somebody actually uses the major performance hog.. I was about uninstalling Vista deeming it as super-slow before finding how to disable previous versions. Every single build of a program takes an eternity. Every file operation becomes super slow. And disk space flies away with Vista using this feature. Quite costly for anything except a very low usage scenario.

re: How the Magic of Windows Vista saved 38G of my data

Jonathan — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:36:27 GMT

To my understanding, VSS stores its snapshots on "free" locations on the disk, and that space is not counted as "used". So there's no percievable loss of storage space*. OTOH, you can't rely on this as long-term backup, since snapshots can go away as soon as the FS needs the space. It's not a managed backup system - it's a "maybe-it'll-save-my-ass" system, as Larry has shown.

* I imagine HD images of virtual machines would still have to store this info, so you'd see a size increase in there.

re: How the Magic of Windows Vista saved 38G of my data

Cheong — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 05:09:34 GMT

Sven: From my observation with Win2003 Volume Shadow Copy, the space be used will shrink automatically if you're running out of space. So it DOES take your space, but it doesn't really matter. :)

Larry: 38GB of data! I just wonder what is the default size of the shadow storage assigned. :O Or is it a flowing one? (i.e.: the system will just attempt to store as much versions of files as possible in the free space?)