“A leak Wednesday has uncovered plans for Windows 8 to imitate the behavior of Time Machine in Mac OS X,” Electronista reports.
“Nicknamed History Vault, it would use the Shadow Copies feature that came as early as Vista but give it a proper visual interface for restoring older files,” Electronista reports. “The WinRumors shot doesn’t provide many details of the restoration process but shows that users could use both real and virtual drives to make a History Vault archive.”
MacDailyNews Take: Instead of having them fly through space to go back in time, we bet that Derivativesoft will force their sufferers to swim underwater or through lava or jump down a rabbit hole or something else equally stupid and incongruous.
Electronista continues, “Apple’s equivalent feature first appeared in Mac OS X Leopard in 2005 [sic], roughly two years before Vista, and was considered one of the first easy backup options to include an individual file restore system. Mac OS X Lion is due to add a Versions parallel that will let users go back through many edits of a single file instead of simply going by date.”
MacDailyNews Note: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard with Time Machine was released on October 26, 2007.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Mimeosoft.
That’ll be the day….
Good luck with that- Plug and Prey will now mean Doomsday.
Microsoft!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
😆
What else could one expect? Again, to “provide a revolutionary and innovative operating system”, winedoseis massively investing into copycating… These folks are just soooo pathetic!
M$ doing what they do best.
They don’t actually copy things that well.
It’s still their best
That’s funny I was using Volume Shadow Copies on Windows XP for a long time.
I also used the NT backup system for years going back to NT4.
Really all they are doing is putting a new GUI over tech that has been in the OS for eons.
Although the new backup software in Windows 7 is pretty slick. I like that you can mount the virtual VHD files it produces as drives.
You can mount Time Machine archives as drives too, along with restore from them, or use the Time Machine interface. Even more cool is that you can migrate from Time Machine. When you get a new Mac, just migrate from Time Machine and it can take very little time for your new Mac to have everything copied and set up. It’s quite amazing.
As far as you being one of the few people doing Volume Shadow copies, it’s very different from Time Machine. In addition to what I just mentioned, the biggest difference has to do with the ease of use. On the Mac, all someone needs to do is plug in one cable from a hard drive and say “yes” to setting it up as a Time Machine volume. This is why even the least capable people I know are using Time Machine, but hardly anyone I know even backs up comprehensively on Windows.
I had no idea you could mount time machine volumes in the finder. Schweet!
My last backup I did on my mac I had so little data at the time on the machine that I just dumped it over to a share on my NAS and then copied it back after I installed snow lep.
Shadow copying is in Server 2003 and even NT had last known good config (though I never saw it work lol)
Well the dates are not correct. Mac OS X Leopard came out in October 2007, while Windows Vista came out in November 2006. I don’t know the feature in Vista for shadow copies but no matter Apple’s Time Machine is a better solution. Lion only improves that further with Versions and Recovery mode.
Honestly, this was my first real laugh of the day. “Time Machine” becomes “History Vault.”
Still makes me smile.
Kinda like Al Capone’s history vaults
Does that mean they’ll be full of dirt and Geraldo’s broken dreams?
@MDN Take.
Windows will still use a space/time warp visual like Time Machine. However instead of stars it will use the old Flying Windows screensaver. 😉
This ersatz offering is late to the game, even if it were released today instead of “late 2012”.
Microsoft… copying until extinct, apparently.
Maybe Microsoft should change their name to MacRipoff.
Better lock that down, because I’m going to steal it. 🙂
Microsoft should just call it “Time Machine”. After all, “time” and “machine” are just ordinary, everyday words, and there is nothing special about combination of the two. No one could get upset about that, right?
Besides, Peabody and his pet boy Sherman had the “Wayback Machine”.
Perfect. MS should just call it “Wayback Machine.” 🙂
Comparing shadow copy to TM is just plain dumb. True to nature MS fires up the copy machines again. lol
Someone needs to do their homework.
Apple did not invent individual file restoration. “Shadow Copy” has been available since 2003 as part of MicroSoft Server. Unfortunately it only operated as a finder window, showing filenames and date saved, meaning one would have to guess at a time and open a document to see if it’s what they are wanting to retrieve. Apple’s GUI for TimeMachine is much more elegant and shows the actual documents as you scroll through them. The only thing MicroSoft is doing with History Vault is adding an animated GUI on top of Shadow Copy to mimic the obvious benefits and simplicity of TimeMachine.
And really …. MicroSoft pioneered the entire restoration concept prior to TimeMachine, so who’s copied who??
Extensive backup and selective restore have been available on Unix and VMS systems since the 80’s. Only it then took the capabilities of a hardcore system manager to use it (usually by taking the system off-line for a few hours once a week). Of course everything was in the manuals for everybody to look at and study. 3-10 ft. of manuals. You only needed to read up 10-20% of that (on privileges, on the backup utility, on using the command line effectively, on tape handling, etc.).
So what, if NT already had a backup utility (after all, the main architect of NT was one of the chief VMS designers -VMS was pretty secure, much better than Unix at the time). Too bad they had to water down everything till they arrived at the security-hole laden Windows (still loved by too many due to the Stockholm syndrome).
It is usability and a proper GUI that makes the difference.
The thing that is great about Time Machine, compared to other backup tools, is that you can go into Time Machine’s archive “manually,” using a Finder window. The archive is just a folder organized into date/time sub-folders, which are then organized just like the original (starting at the volume level). You can access individual files using a regular Finder window instead of using the “flying through space” interface, if desired. That gives me a lot of confidence. Most other backup utilities create these huge cryptic archive files that can only be accessed through the utility and only if you perform a restore of the entire archive.
Through multi-linking, a file that never changes is stored just once, but to the user, it appears in ALL the backup date/time sub-folders. It appears to be in every one of those date/time sub-folders (when the file existed), but Time Machine is only saving a new copy of the file if it has changed since the last backup. The whole Time Machine system is efficient, understandable, and user friendly.
“The whole Time Machine system is efficient, understandable, and user friendly.”
Must be why Microsoft needed Apple to do it first.
No doubt Microsoft’s “Shadow Copy” includes allowing Hackers direct access to your file system, where they’ll “back up” all your personal information, including credit card info, passwords, etc. Maybe if you ask nicely, “backup service providers/hackers” will use version control and you can request previous edits of your information & identity…
Point: Is Time Machine a good product/feature? Does the consumer who purchased Leopard/SL/Lion benefit?
If you answered yes to both, then so what? The more MS “steals” ideas from Apple and Apple “steals” from MS the better the consumer will be. This would keep both companies innovating faster. Keep your trade secrets but when you release a feature/product, it’s fair game for another company to offer it. The company that knows how to innovate, stays ahead. The other’s that only know how to copy will lag behind.
There isn’t one winner with many losers in business, there are lots of winners and lots of losers. Some make more profit than others. Doesn’t mean the ones who made less profit lost. They still turned a profit. I, for one, salute MS for copying Apple as they have done in the past. If Apple sees MS as a competitor to stay in front of, that can only be good for Mac customers.
I mostly agree with you. I too want M$ to continue to be a constant reminder to Apple of what they do not want to become.
Where we differ is the kind of salute I’d give them.
Microstupid sure comes up with the lamest names for stuff.
Yeah. Vault; a burial chamber, locked storage area for archives.
So already Microstupid is good on the get go! 😉
MS should call it “Throwback”
and just like their OS, people, if they were smart, would just ‘throw away’ the whole damn mess that is the PC.
Yeah M$ is pretty pathetic, but what is more pathetic are the millions of utter morons the keep slurping up whatever oozes out of Gates/balmer’s ass for decades. These are the same idiots who give permission now to Google to install a permanent hose to suck every last bit of private data out from their ass.
Now that is pathetic!