Windows Vista Tips For Writers #22

I found a very interesting feature in Windows Vista today that I wanted to share. If you right click on a file and select PROPERTIES, the Properties dialog box for the selected file appears. Choose the DETAILS tab and it now lists “Total Editing Time”.

So in the screen snap, you can see that I’ve spent 10 hours and 58 minutes on the story I’m currently working on! Now I’ve just noticed this, so I’m going to have to do a little investigating..my fear is that if I leave the file open, go to lunch, come back, it considers that editing time…but I may (hopefully) be wrong. I’ll let you know what I discover. 

The other thing I’d like to mention is Vista’s use of a feature that first appeared in their Windows Server product: Shadow Copies. Vista notes your changes to a file so that if you ever want to go back to a previous iteration, you can access it from the PREVIOUS VERSIONS tab. The way it work is that Vista checks once a day to see which data files on your system have changed (mine does so around 1 in the morning). Then, it saves the changes so that if you ever need to go back to a previous version, you can access it from here – another very handy feature for the writer! What's really cool is that Vista is not actually maintaining multiple copies of your docs – it saves the deltas. The deltas are logged once a day, so if you make multiple changes in a day, only the new version at the end of the day is saved. I used this feature about a month ago when I accidentally deleted some files I sorely needed. Yes, you can also recover totally deleted files if you can remember what folder they resided in (just like files, you can restore previous versions of folders).