Submitted by Vista has an inbuilt undelete system based on Windows Server 2003’s versioning file system, Microsoft has revealed. The technology, which is automatically switched on in Vista, will be a boon for anyone who has accidentally overwritten their PhD thesis with a BPAY receipt.
Vista To Have Inbuilt Undelete
79 Comments
2006-07-30 11:42 pm
2006-07-30 8:16 pm
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2006-07-30 8:17 pm
2006-07-30 8:20 pm
2006-07-30 8:22 pm
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2006-07-30 9:42 pm
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2006-07-31 5:34 am
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2006-07-31 10:00 am
2006-07-30 8:35 pm
2006-07-30 8:37 pm
Kroc 
Not everyone will agree, but I prefer not overcomplicating things by forever losening the definition of “delete” in the OS, it only goes to add more confusion.
When you empty the trash in Mac OS, it’s gone, no coming back. If you make mistakes, you learn from them.
You should be trained to understand when something is properly deleted. The Amiga went one better – it didn’t ask “Are you sure you want to delete?”, you learnt to only delete files when you were absolutely sure the first time, not the third or fourth step down the line :/
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2006-07-31 4:44 am
2006-07-30 9:03 pm
l3v1
…who also always use(d) the recycle bin or other non-deleting safekeeper apps 
You can call me anyway you like, but I always turn off the recycle bin, and for versioning I use svn. When I delete something, I want it to be deleted, I had to think hard but I’m sure I never deleted “accidentally” anything during my 15+ years around computers. In fact, I never delete anything until I have space left, only such things which were useless in the first place, but I do cleaning around my disks every few months – and even then I mostly archive and don’t delete.
My reason for the above ? Not deleting, using svn, archiving more and less important stuff is still better than having a trash can or recycle bin with stuff laying in heaps.
2006-07-30 10:18 pm
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2006-08-01 2:02 pm
2006-07-30 10:21 pm
RandomGuy
sorry, should be “safe delete” and not “save delete”
Why don’t I ever catch any typos while proof reading? 
2006-07-30 10:36 pm
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2006-08-01 6:28 am
How about “Un-Close” So when you accidentally close an app, you click it and it opens with everything as it was. Would be real nice for web browsers. Not to much of an issue on Windows, but on Mac apple has decided the close button should be right next to the back button on browsers (among other things the close button is to close to). “Un-close” would be nice there. No more loosing all the pages you had open.
I actually proposed a sort of ‘window-manager-undo’ to Robert Szeleney of SkyOS, and he found it an interesting idea, and he would look into it. I need to ask him about this one of these days, thanks for reminding me
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Opera has this feature … undelete is nothing new, just a slight modification of an exisiting technology coupled with increased usage of data storage which are getting cheaper by day. I really don’t see the point of this article. It is not news, nor it is amazing … could it be that somebody is missusing OSNews for marketing???
This is called “saved session state” in the OS literature, and operating systems have done it in various ways over the years. The two best examples I’m familiar with are the Smalltalk machine and the Lisp machine. I believe that Squeek (the current opensource implementation does it.)
Typically, it’s not a feature implemented at the OS level because the OS has to save a huge amount of state to accomplish it, so it becomes a feature of the application — and few application writers ever bother, unfortunately.
And how about uncrash? I’m gonna like that
A built-in keylogger for word.
So much for the world’s most secure OS!
What a joke.
A password logger
Its nice to see MS server side technologies work the way down to the consumer OS.
I like volume shadow copy vs. pulling up a 3rd party undelete application and hoping the data I want has not been overwritten yet.
As a version control enthusiast, I’m really glad to see it happen.
Storage is cheap enough these days to afford the keep-all-changes,
never-delete policy for every user. Yet most people don’t use version
control simply because it’s not part of the OS. Embedding version
control in mainstream OS’s will change this; it will give users the
feeling of safety and control through unlimited storage undo. Access
to the contents of their computer not only in space but also in time.
Versioning filesystems make life easier also for those who already use
revision control to keep track of their documents. With implicit
versioning embeded in the OS, you don’t have to bother with typing
“svn commit” every time you hit “save”. You don’t have to browse the
manual every time you want to retrieve an old revision. Moving some
of the svn functionality to the file system seems very natural and
useful to me.
I’m very excited about this because it is an excellent chance to make
versioning filesystems mainstream. Of course, many issues might and
will appear (security for one), but I really hope they’ll get it
right. It’s worth it.
Good job Microsoft! This is a desperately needed feature, especially on Windows where certain apps (*cough* Internet Explorer *cough*) make it particularly easy to lose or accidentally delete your data.
If it’s implemented well, it could be a significant advantage for Vista. It’s a tricky feature to implement, though, so I hope they get it right.
I’m curious. How does IE make it easy to delete your data?
One example. If you click on a link to a Word document in IE, it’ll open it inside the IE window by saving the document to a temporary local folder. If you then edit that document and close the IE window, your document is lost in that temporary directory. Compare that to what Safari and Firefox do by default. Instead of allowing the user to edit the document while it is in some nebulous no-man’s land, they’ll download the document to the user’s default download folder, so edits are not lost.
Windows users will argue about how these things are just protection for stupid users, but that’s a poor argument. Well-designed products protect the user in the case of exceptional circumstances, while simultaniously staying out of their way during normal use. Historically, Apple is just better with this sort of design than Microsoft.
In a similar vein, there’s the way that IE saves EVERY download to a temp folder first, regardless of where you tell it to download the file. It wouldn’t really be a problem, except for the way it pops up a dialogue when the download finishes, notifying you that the file is being copied to the actual download destination. And an extra nice touch, the “Cancel” button is selected – so if you happen to be typing when it pops up, and hit the space bar, you cancel the copy process. I’ve had that happen several times over the years, and on a few occasions I had no luck locating the original in Temporary Internet Files. At this point, I avoid using IE for downloads if at all possible.
Of the “big” browsers available for windows, it also has the least functionality in terms of download management (compared to Opera and Mozilla / Firefox). Hell, even the ancient NetPositive 2.2.1 has a better DL manager than IE 6 (and better PNG support, pathetically enough).
And while I’m ranting about IE 6, here’s two more complaints: it’s the main reason I still use table-based layouts (yes, I know they make baby Jesus cry) with CSS for formatting. I made an attempt to learn CSS for layouts, but was discouraged by the pattern of “here’s the two lines of code to perform this task…. and there’s the 12 lines of code you’ll need to make it work in both IE and Firefox.” Separation of layout and design is a nice idea and all, but it doesn’t absolutely require CSS layout – you could do that 15 years ago with CGI scripts, a PH database, and HTML templates. And that’s not mentioning the lazy web coder’s best friend: virtual/server-side includes.
And last, while IE’s rendering engine may be fast, the actual UI is dog-slow. Opera 4 running on a P90 responds faster than IE 6 on my Athlon64 3000+. Scrolling is the action I find most painful in IE – your options are basically “smooth” scrolling (aka, the mode where scrolling lags behind arrow key-presses so you often end up scrolling further than intended), or jump/jerky scrolling mode. I can scroll more smoothly in a 100MB Photoshop/Illustrator file than I can in IE with a 30kb page.
“One example. If you click on a link to a Word document in IE, it’ll open it inside the IE window by saving the document to a temporary local folder. If you then edit that document and close the IE window, your document is lost in that temporary directory. Compare that to what Safari and Firefox do by default. Instead of allowing the user to edit the document while it is in some nebulous no-man’s land, they’ll download the document to the user’s default download folder, so edits are not lost. “
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I greatly prefer IE’s way. First, I’m not often going to edit an online file. If I do, then I can easily save the file to the local location of my choice and then edit it.
More importantly, after using IE, I’ve come to despise reading pdf files in Safari. In IE, clicking a link to a pdf file opens the pdf file within IE via Adobe’s Acrobat ActiveX control. If I then want to save a local copy of the pdf file, the Adobe ActiveX control allows me to do so via the Save button. So, navigating to and optioally saving online pdf files is exactly the same as doing the same for any web page. And it’s great, because I normally don’t want to save a local copy of the pdf file.
But when I’m on my Mac (as I am now), every time I click a link to a pdf file, Safari downloads the file to my desktop (or wherever my default downloads folder happens to be at the time), then opens the local copy with Preview (or Adobe, if that’s been set as the default pdf handler). I then need to clean up by going to the download folder and explicitly deleting the damn thing. A few months ago, I found approx. two dozen pdf files in one of my old downloads folders, none of which I wanted on my local harddrive; I only wanted to browse those pdfs, not save them; just like a normal web page. IE’s way is better. And “innovative”. The other browsers are primitive by comparision wrt to clicking links to pdf, doc, xls, ppt, etc files.
Above, I referred to Adobe’s Acrobat ActiveX control, but I misspoke. In the above case, Adobe’s ActiveX control isn’t handling the pdf file within IE, but the Adobe Acrobat or Reader app itself is handling it via IOleDocument, et al. The same mechanism is used by IE to get Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and other IOleDocument supporting apps to host doc, xls, ppt, etc files within IE.
(I think Adobe’s ActiveX control is used for handling pdf content embedded inside html pages (same as the Adobe plugins used by other browsers.)
On a side now, how do you edit you posts on this forum? I think I’ve seen others do it, but I don’t see how they did it.
On a side now, how do you edit you posts on this forum? I think I’ve seen others do it, but I don’t see how they did it.
Click Reply. Above the box for the response, you should see that Reply has been replaced with Edit.
It would be a nice feature if they did it properly. I’m not getting my hopes too high though. If they can’t even implement something as simple as sudo without making it a massive pain to use why should we expect they’ll get the undelete right?
… but I sure as hell hope that there is a secure delete along with this tool, because there are times when you want something truely deleted, and not have someone coming up behind you to find your private infomation (banking, etc) – I think this feature lends itself more to law enforcement than it does home users?
“Normal” delete doesn’t delete either, so a “secure” delete would be nice anyway.
Some time around 1995 microsoft realised that people don’t think about what they are doing and tend to do stupid things. So they stole the idea of the ‘trash can’ from apple.
I remember deleting stuff and forgeting to remove it from the ‘recycle bin’.
I’m sure this versioning is going to be awesomely confusing for users. Just like the inbuilt versioning in Microsoft office documents.
Hopefully it won’t be unabled by default, but I’m sure it will.
isn’t this just another…
MS Boss Department:
“huh, people seem to respond very badly on our unsure comments when Vista will come out. Lets throw in some completely stupid and not usefull feature for them to write about instead of bad publicity! (*shouting..*) Hey which feature would be easiest to copy/paste into Vista and our PR department didn’t promised it yet?”
Hell, VAX had this feature. Linux had this feature and god knows only how many others. And unless this feature is not controllable and contained it is more a nuissance than a good thing.
Edited 2006-07-30 17:06
Finally! A feature in Vista that seems reasonably useful to people!
Yea – let’s just see how long it takes for them to say nevermind! undelete will no longer be in vista, just like all of the other technologies we said we would put in it
LOL
Apple stole the wastebasket from the Xerox Star.
You can see it in this screenshot:
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/thexeroxstararetrospective…
Article:
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/thexeroxstararetrospective
As for complaints that versioning will be “unsecure” or “confusing” … that is so moronic.
Versioning is a superb idea well implimented in OpenVMS that saves IT Departments a ton of time. Retrieving deleted files is a huge waste of resources.
Longhorn server has network undelete. Yay!
Yes, Apple “borrowed” many ideas from Xerox. I used a mouse to control a graphical interface that included icons and windows in a Xerox Star system way before the Apple Lisa even existed.
All I can is this…
Apple may have borrowed it from Xerox but how long did Apple borrow it from Xerox before Microsoft borrowed it from Apple?
The recycle bin came a long time after the Mac OS. I remember the MS guys saying something like this to the Apple guys:
“You have to delete things twice? How stupid!”
Then Windows 95 came out with the borrowed Recycle Bin. Something tells me that Microsoft wasn’t actually borrowing the idea from Xerox directly.
LOL.
So if Apple “borrows” and idea, then its all good. Let Microsoft do the same thing and suddenly they just stole an idea.
Double standards. Gotta love em!
Actually, Apple made a commercial arrangement with Xerox so they’ll show them what they had, and later hired several members of Xerox’ development team. So, I wouldn’t so much say “borrow” as “bought/hired/further developed Xerox technology”
Again, MS could do the same thing and the same people who would defend Apple in such a move would blast MS for just buying/borrowing technology from someone else.
I think some people have completely and totally have misunderstood what I was saying. In NO WAY did I put Microsoft in a negative light here when it came to using the Recycle Bin. I was responding to the comment about Apple “stealing” the idea of Trash from Xerox. I merely said that Apple implemented the idea well before Microsoft did. I didn’t even use the word “steal” anywhere in my comment.
The quote was from Windows USERS to Apple USERS. Not the companies themselves. I had heard this I don’t know how many times and I wasn’t even very old when I heard it.
In no way was my observation meant to be inflammatory, so why did I get modded down? And double standard? In what way is my comment a double standard?
Apple gave Xerox a sizable chunk of shares for get inside look. But anyway, Xerox didn’t make up the mouse – check google video for: englebart demos (from the late 60s)
Seem to remember Undelete being part of Windows OS (or at least MS DOS) a long way back. Perhaps a more appropriate name would be NeverDelete or Can’tDelete (as in: if you’re a novice MS won’t let you delete your old files).
At least the HDD manufacturers will be happy.
Yes, (MS)DOS had several good third paty undelete tools. The default one also kinda worked, but not reliably: you had to specify first letter of the file and it couldn’t restore deleted directories, and if any chunk was overwritten, complete file was lost.
Today disk space is cheap, so Vista should really destroy data only if it needs space for something else (or if a deleted file is really big). Makes sense, and I wonder why they didn’t have that option even in XP.
Yay, yet another way for virii to just merilly restore themselves after a successful removal.
System restore anyone ?
If a virus is removed, how exactly would it restore itself?
By it’s or another running process, or by some script hidden in the startup sequence. Just look at how viruses made use of Windows Restore Points and NTFS Volume Shadows.
But if you remove it, usually you remove it via an application that should usually remove *everything*.
If you remove it manually, it’s your own damn fault.
What a brand new an innovative idea that hasn’t been implemented in every other OS forever!
I can’t wait to see IE7 final also! With other innovative features that Microsoft has created, such as tabs, rss feeds, and png transparency support!
This is great news indeed, and SUPER innovative!
What a brand new an innovative idea that hasn’t been implemented in every other OS forever!
What is the name for the similar feature in GUN/Linux?
you can undelete with midnight commander if you want. Heck, if you know what you are doing, you can do it in the console.
In fact, here you go.
http://recover.sourceforge.net/linux/
That isn’t even remotely usable.
you can undelete with midnight commander if you want. Heck, if you know what you are doing, you can do it in the console.
In fact, here you go.