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I was reading about Shadow Copy service in Vista and it sounded interesting but you seem to need at least Business version to get it. Then I thought of the old VMS file system with built in file versions. Sure enough there's a freeware set of command line utilities for download. I've tried it on XP Pro and Vista Home Premium 32 bit and they seem fine. Here's the link:
I can never remember 'glindra' so after I installed I changed the top folder name to VMS and then put the VMS\bin directory in the PATH. For those who haven't used VMS it had a neat feature in the file system that did quick and dirty file versioning. Say you had your text editor and you're working on a file MyLog.txt and you save to an empty directory. You have MyLog.txt, then as you change the file in the editor and save it, you have MyLog.txt;1 MyLog.txt;2 etc.. when this clutter builds up you run the 'purge' command and tell it how many of the newest versions to keep as in
purge /keep=2
I have a habit of backing up stuff that I change a lot to another folder, then inside that folder I'll have a Bak folder. So I end up emptying the Bak folder, moving the stuff from the parent folder, then copying from the source folder to the backup folder. After all that I still only get 2 backup versions. With the VMS command line utils(glindra) when I do
"cop *.* \DestFolder" any files with the same name in the destination are
versioned with ~n~ extra extension.. the higher the number 'n' the older the backup. Like in VMS there's a port of the purge command, 'pu' to clear out the clutter. This way with only one backup folder I can have an arbitrary number of backups for each source file.
Anyway, if you'd like to try them they're free for non-commercial use.
I can never remember 'glindra' so after I installed I changed the top folder name to VMS and then put the VMS\bin directory in the PATH. For those who haven't used VMS it had a neat feature in the file system that did quick and dirty file versioning. Say you had your text editor and you're working on a file MyLog.txt and you save to an empty directory. You have MyLog.txt, then as you change the file in the editor and save it, you have MyLog.txt;1 MyLog.txt;2 etc.. when this clutter builds up you run the 'purge' command and tell it how many of the newest versions to keep as in
purge /keep=2
I have a habit of backing up stuff that I change a lot to another folder, then inside that folder I'll have a Bak folder. So I end up emptying the Bak folder, moving the stuff from the parent folder, then copying from the source folder to the backup folder. After all that I still only get 2 backup versions. With the VMS command line utils(glindra) when I do
"cop *.* \DestFolder" any files with the same name in the destination are
versioned with ~n~ extra extension.. the higher the number 'n' the older the backup. Like in VMS there's a port of the purge command, 'pu' to clear out the clutter. This way with only one backup folder I can have an arbitrary number of backups for each source file.
Anyway, if you'd like to try them they're free for non-commercial use.