Datasheet

acts like a puppet while you pull the strings from afar — must be running

Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Ultimate, Vista Business,

or Vista Enterprise. Alas, XP Home, Vista Home Basic, and Vista Home

Premium aren’t sufficiently endowed. In other words, XP Pro, Vista

Ultimate, Vista Business, and Vista Enterprise PCs can play Pinocchio

to your puppeteer. All the other operating systems don’t have strings

that can be pulled.

Tapping into previous versions of a file

Windows Home Server supports “previous versions,” but the feature probably

doesn’t work the way you think it does.

If you have Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate, you already

have a shadow-copy feature, and it works on all files and folders on your

Vista computer. Once a day, usually around midnight, these versions of Vista

take a snapshot of all the files on your computer that you’ve changed during

the previous day and store the snapshots — creating what is commonly called

shadow copy. Anytime you mess up a file that’s located on your Business,

Enterprise, or Ultimate computer, you can right-click the file, choose

Properties, then click the Previous Versions tab and bring back any earlier

snapshot of the file.

That’s a very powerful capability, which I discuss at length in

Windows Vista

Timesaving Techniques For Dummies

(Wiley Publishing, Inc.). Installing WHS

doesn’t turn off the feature you’ve already paid for — but the Vista Business,

Enterprise, and Ultimate shadow-copy feature works only on files located on

the Vista PC. Files stored on your Windows Home Server, uh, server don’t

inherit the shadow copying capability from Vista Business, Enterprise, or

Ultimate.

Here’s where things get complicated.

Windows Home Server keeps shadow copies, but only for files stored in shared

folders on the server. WHS doesn’t reach into your Windows XP or Vista com-

puter to make shadow copies, but it does make shadow copies of your data

files on the server. It automatically takes snapshots of all the altered shared

files and folders

on the server twice a day — at noon and midnight every day.

But the method and the relative ease of access differ — depending on what

version of Windows XP or Vista your computer is running:

 If you run Windows XP Service Pack 2 (either Home or Pro), you can

use this Windows Home Server “previous versions” capability to easily

bring back one of the snapshots, using a Previous Versions. (See

Chapter 14.)

Chapter 1: Bringing Windows Home Server to Life

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