A Missing Windows Feature

It’s 2009 and when I save a file in Windows, all previous history and revisions of the file are lost. That was acceptable in 1982. Some applications do it, and of course you can easily setup and use your own revision control system, but that’s a lot of overhead for what really should be built into the OS. Furthermore, there is also no built-in backup feature. You have to do it yourself. The backup problem requires too much user intervention. In my mind, it is still not solved.

(And yes, some of this stuff is in Linux and Mac to some degree (i.e. Time Machine)).

I decided it was time I stopped doing backups by running my own ftp scripts and backing up to USB hard drives. I installed Dropbox as a way to share files between Windows PCs (which is actually easier than Windows itself), and realized that with Dropbox pro ($99 / yr) plus the packrat option ($39), I get unlimited undo and 50GB of space. I setup the dropbox folder as the base folder for all my personal files. When it finishes synchronizing (50 GB is a lot!) I’ll have my automatic backup and full file history.

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