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Microsoft Adds Risky System-Wide Undelete to Vista
douder writes "Windows Vista will have a new 'previous versions' feature when it ships next year. According to Ars Technica, the
feature is built off of the volume shadow copy technology from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Now turned on by default, the service stores the modified versions of a user's documents, even after they are deleted. They also report that you can browse folders from within Explorer to see snapshots of what they contained over time. It can be disabled, but this seems like a privacy concern." From the article: "Some users will find the feature objectionable because it could give the bossman a new way to check up on employees, or perhaps it could be exploited in some nefarious way by some nefarious person. Previous versions of Windows were still susceptible to undelete utilities, of course, but this new functionality makes browsing quite, quite simple. On the other hand, it should be noted that 'Previous Versions' does not store its data in the files themselves. That is, unlike Microsoft Office's 'track changes,' files protected with 'Previous Versions' will not carry their documentary history with them."
I think I deleted slashdot.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all...
The security risks could be eliminated by encrypted the user's home directory, a la Mac OS X.
It's a fantastic feature. I remember Novell Netware had this and we used it a lot to roll back changes to code. It was better than version control when only one person was working on the project.
I wonder if OS X 10.5 was going to have such a feature and it leaked out. This is actually a quasi-innovative idea from Microsoft. Maybe they stole it from Apple via corporate spying.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
"could give the bossman a new way to check up on employees"
Um, your work computer is the property of your employer. If you want to do something that would get you in trouble with your boss - put it on your own computer. Plus all this does is back up files that you have made, how is this a privacy concern? Even if this was happening and you never knew it and uploading all your files to a central server, it's still an option of your employer, and not an invasion of privacy, it's crappy, but the option of your boss and his/her company. Just like the fact that they can read your business email. No different, and to me even less intrusive than that since you can't control incoming mail.
Amazing that a Good Thing gets turned into a big-brother or privacy issue just because it's Microsoft. Shadow copy has saved my ass twice in the past year and the more it's available, the better. If employees are worried about the boss checking up on them, then maybe they should just do their job.
Keep in mind that the goal and justification of a desktop is productivity, not some vaguely defined "monitoring" issue.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Good luck if I run it under a VM.. If I have to run it at all...
If I get my hands on a beta of vista I can undelete things that I won't create for years?
As with System Restore, Windows Firewall, Remote Assistance, etc... just disable, delete and install better applications to provide the same functionality. MS should just focus on security, stability, and releasing the damn thing.
http://religiousfreaks.com/So this is bad because "...perhaps it could be exploited in some nefarious way by some nefarious person"?
So, um, turn it off if you don't like it. I personally am going to love this feature.
/I for one welcome the Previous Versions of our new Overlords.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't get the privacy concern. If someone gains physical access to your machine, then the contents are vulnerable unless you take active steps to prevent it. People have known forever that stuff may not be lost forever just because it's deleted. This feature doesn't change that.
The issue is that this makes it "easier" but I can't help but see that as a neat feature.
The really silly part is this:
If that's what keeps you up at night, then you better give up on all technology, not just this.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It can be disabled (and should be by default or asked for on first boot) If it's easy to locate the enabled folders (like your shared folders) then I don't see a problem with privacy.
With Windows Vista, the operating system will make "shadow" (that is, backup) copies of files and folders for users who have "System Protection" enabled (the default setting).
In Windows Vista, each partition that is protected by "System Restore" requires at least 300MB of space, and may use up to 15 percent of the available space on a partition to store previous versions of files. In the event that more space is required, the service will delete older restore points to make room for new ones.
always mosh clockwise
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-112322121 7782777472
If you have windows 2003 r2 or sharepoint, you already have this feature. I enabled it on our network and people like it. there is a previous versions tab when right clicking a file in xp and selecting properties and then "previous versions". You tell windows 2003 r2 how much space you want to allocation for previous versions and then how often you want it to index versions of changed documents. It has saved me a lot of trouble restoring from backup when someone saves a change they didnt mean to make.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
In a normal office environment, assuming you can keep the porn and mp3's under control, people don't create enough bits in the course of a day to be an issue. Remember that this is the age of 300Gig harddrives for $100.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
not to switch from XP.... Um.. Thanks M$ for letting me save some cash.... I guess
Vista comes with the Previous Version Explorer extension installed by default, and System Restore now watches the whole disk.
Ok. So what? This feature has been around for awhile, and if you have privacy issues, well just disable system restore (or whatever the equivalent option will be in Vista).
Never mind that as you make new versions of a file, the old ones are still hanging around in your drives' free space for a long time (about the same amount of time the previous-versions feature would keep them). So basically you're making the distinction between being able to access the deleted files explictly, vs. having to use a drive recovery tool.
If you're security concious, you disable the old restore points, fill the drive with a big file full of random data, then delete it. This isn't going to change...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
No i'm not talking about Mel Gibson and his anti-Jew story.
I'm talking about Steve Gibson (http://www.grc.com) everyone know's the security maniac and amazingly intellegent man is going to beg Microsoft to take this out, watch for Security Now later this week or next.
Remember what he did with Windows XP and Raw-Sockets, he went on TechTV's TechLive show and asked Microsoft to remove the feature.
This is a security risk for the unaware computer users of this world who will buy "Vista Capable" machines from the Big-Box stores (Best Buy...) Think about it? An exploit is uncovered that gives access to remote computers running Vista, and the intruder or cracker or script kiddie, undeletes some confidential files, you all know where that could go, then bam! Lawsuit anyone.
All this feature is, is System Restore on steroids or System Restore 2.0 and it's a security risk, I hope Steve pushes Microsft Corporation to do the right thing, this time they should listen.
"Go suck your head." - Edward Runey
Yes, other people have thought of it before, but kudos to Microsoft for implementing it. Disks are cheap, whereas the documents I create are not. Anything which helps protect those documents from mistakes is going to be a good thing.
Shadow copies can be controlled with Group Policy just like everything else in a managed Windows environment.
In addition, Network Appliance have had snapshots in their filesystem since '92. There was no big uproar then about how management could use that to track employees. If an employeer wants to track an employee, there are better ways to do it.
Just out of curiousity, the ability to effectively undelete things ought to rely on the filesystem. In the old days of MS dos, the first chars of the filename were simply changed to a reserved character, which was actually faster than going through and deleting the whole file. When the file system wanted to create a new file, it might use the nodes marked with the "it's ok to delete me flag". That's why MS Dos 6.22 and its brethren required you to type in the first char of the filename when you undeleted a file. So actually no, there's actually no overhead in creating a comprehensive file undelete system. Any 3rd party which implemented the same thing, might cause it to be slower.
If they could be fast in MS DOS 6.22, I don't see why XP would make the feature inherently slower.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
This sounds similar to the file versioning on VMS which I have never heard anyone complain about (other than being wicked annoying). If anything, I would think that people (and by people I mean the techno commoners) would like this feature. I think most people still believe that when you delete a file that it is really gone. Maybe this feature will show people that without wiping the free space on your hard drive things that you thought were gone are still around. I can't see how anyone could think of this as a privacy concern except maybe law enfourcement who end up finding that people are better at permanently deleting files.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
I wonder, could an existing open filesystem be modified so that a file marked with some attribute will store its contents as a log, rather than as a working copy, able to be rolled back and forward (probably by some utility) until squashed, yet have the current copy be worked with transparently, without making (invasive) changes to the VFS? Does something like this already exist? Maybe something using FUSE?
We toyed for a while with implementing something like this in our scientific data management application and decided in the end that it just wasn't possible because the (instrument vendor provided) applications would have to be modified to deliver information about when to create a "version" of a file. Instead, we require users to provide us with this information manually.
-c
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
a built-in versioning system. Want to roll back to a previous version? Bam, done. Want to fork? Just make a copy of the "old version" and move on.
I'd like directory-by-directory control over this, some way of controlling when the old versions "go away" (I don't want mass-id3'ing of my MP3 collection to clobber my old documents, for example), as well as efficient move operations. But, as many are saying, this sounds like basically a good thing.
It's a feature, and a pretty cool one. I wouldn't mind this in Linux. This is not a bad thing.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I have a little and simple rsync-backup script that does basically the same: runs every day, uses locate to search for .rsync-backup files and then stores the directories containing these files. Simple. Elegant. Transparent. Efficient. No need to mess around with system-internals.
no wonder way windows vista need 20GB of space to install and 15GB free after that.
Eventually, you'll probably see most operating systems implementing this, or this being implemented in a virtual machine. If you're concerned about privacy, you should be using crypography anyway (now, the question being, how do you isolate the entered passwords to unlock your keyring from the snapshots taken by a virtual machine hosting your operating system).
At any rate, there is more good to this than bad, and since this isn't even a real snapshotting mechanism (snapshotting your system memory) your crypto will protect you just fine.
I used an OS back in the 70s, Twenex from Digital Equipment Corp, that had file versioning. Every time you wrote out a file it kept the previous N versions, typically 5. It wasn't oriented towards deletion so much as recovering old versions after you screwed one up. It was a pretty nice feature, although it tended to fill up disk space which was in short supply in those days.
Today, I thought undeleting was what the trash can was for. With today's big disks you shouldn't have to Empty Trash very often.
Every once in a while I see a comment here or there about how great it would be to put your entire /home in CVS (or SVN, or pick your favorite) to be able to keep a revision history on everything you do.
How is this different? It sounds like a fabulous idea to me -- being a sysadming -- and a great timesaver when it comes to "I just deleted these files, do you hvave the backup tapes?"
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
SCO used to have this feature back in the 90's. Also, the VMS filesystem has had versioning since several decades back, and according to the Wikipedia article the feature was first found in TENEX which was created in 1969.
Anybody know how will this be implemented? Will the copy of each file be complete? incremental? or the original a diff of the last shadow?
Isn't Vista itself a privacy concern of most people? Shouldn't it be?
Windows Volume Shadow Copy operates using a periodic interval (say, 1 day between snapshots).
It makes a whole-filesystem snapshot. It doesn't care if files are open, if that was the case across a snapshot then those files are invalid for that snapshot.
Typically you schedule a snapshot for after-hours so you have a reasonable guarantee that user files are closed and consistant.
The nice thing about a time-based snapshot system is that it doesn't need to store much between the snapshots if nothing changed (this is similar to other systems like LVM or Veritas).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
For mentioning Steve Gibson in a post:
http://www.grcsucks.com/
No sig, sorry.
XPs: System Restore
Windows 2003: Volume Shadow Copy / Previous Versions
It's a system service that puts a shim between userspace and your physical disks (like LVM on linux). It can take file-system wide snapshots at configurable intervals. Those different names are just different levels of user-space interaction with the same underlying stuff.
VSS can notify programs that a snapshot is about to be taken. If they are VSS aware they will flush their open files to make sure the snapshot is "consistent". Otherwise the snapshot could be made of files that are corrupt (in the middle of being changed by an application). Most applications by 3rd parties are unfortunately not VSS-aware. Office 2003+ and MS SQL Server 2005 are, however, which is nice.
The snapshot is made at the block level, having no real knowledge of "files" per-se. It records changed blocks between snapshots so you can construct a historical version of a whole disk. It's not like rsync or anything.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It doesn't actually delete your data, just flag the space as free. The problem is that undeletion in that matter is unrelaible at best. A fiel is at any time subject to partial or complete overwrite, even if there's ample free space on the drive. When it's flagged as free the OS sees it as free period. There's no prioritisng the free space to not overwrite newley delete files (DOS was the same way).
This gives you more reliability. The files are stored and aren't messed with until the space is needed. So if you delete something and still have 500GB free, it'll keep the file since you can afford the space and it'll be marked as allocated and thus not overwritten. Also, it looks like it does version tracking too. If you overrote a file on a FAT or NTFS volume, it writes it to the same space it occupies before, makes sense to do it that way. However that means if you mess up and make a change you didn't want to, there's no undo. You replaced the bytes, it's too late. This will go and keep a copy prior to the change you can roll back to.
Basically it's similar to how NetApp units work. It provides storage that's reliable even against user faults. Things like RAID are great, but they protect only against hardware falure. You can still fuck your data up. There's a market, and MS seems to think the home desktop includes it, for systems that are resiliant against that. You decided to delete 5 paragraphs of that paper and save it, and then deleted it form the disk but now want it? Ok no problem, not only do we have the deleted version, we have the pre modificaiton version.
We use a NetApp FAS 270 at work for home directories for this reason. We aren't really concerned about disk reliability, though it's excellent for that too, and we go to tape nightly. We want to be able to save people from themselves. When they screw something up, we want to be able to get a non-screwed up copy.
MS wants to bring that to home computers. Will it be worth the performance impact? Guess that's too be seen. However it's certianly a good idea in general. What most users really need and want, even if they don't know it, is protection from their own mistakes.
What kind of reasonable privacy expectations should people have on a work computer? When I was working at JPL, all systems were required by law to show a message indicating that all use was being tracked, as it was a secure government facility. (this could not be turned off even when it was interfering with the functioning of certain scripts)
I didn't have a problem with this - if you really want to have a private conversation or IM, use a cell phone that you own. AFAIK, they can't monitor that.
Truely, MS is damned if they do, damned if they don't.
How many times has your mother/father/other family member called you over because they deleted "that one file" they never backed up (it's usually never just "that one file", but that's the typical excuse)? So you head over and, sure enough, the thing is gone. The only recourse is to buy some overpriced Norton Utilities or whatnot (that will probably slow down the system to crawl) and cross fingers.
So, Microsoft enables a feature that's been built-in to the OS for a while and the reaction is instantly negative? Never mind that, daily, petabytes upon petabytes are backed up using VSS around the world, as almost all decent backup software uses it on Windows. Never mind that, if "privacy concerns" get in the way, you can always remove versions in VSS or disable it entirely.
Seems much ado about nothing, personally. Don't like it? Turn it off.
And if you're in a company, well, you don't get a choice. I'm not really sure I understand the "bossman" comments -- in most big companies, the "bossman" has been backing up every file you create, every site you visit, etc. for decades. Granted, 99.99% of it will never be looked at, but in these post-SOX days, you're pretty much mandated to catch that 0.01%. And if you don't like it, well, I guess you can always start a company with your own rules.
Personally, I think this thing is going to be a tremendous blessing. When a relative calls me still using Windows (I've been trying to push them all to Mac), and says "My god, I deleted this crumb cake recipe! I'm doomed!" I'll be able to get it back after a couple clicks. Sounds great to me.
This is just filesystem snapshots. Netapp has had this for a LONG time. FreeBSD has this. It's a great save-your-ass feature. Where's the OMG WTF PRIVACY LOL hate directed at Netapp?
I instinctively hold SHIFT when I delete files.
How dare you question my decisions, explorer.exe! DOWN BOY, DOWN.
Besides, doesn't everyone rsync their old garbage to a file server or burn a DVD before deleting old files to make space?
Oh, you dont? (not necessarily directed to parent) Your loss.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
They had done a quoted search for the title of a particular book. Unfortunately, several porn sites included that title in the meta tags for their home page.
So when they did the search, and it popped up the porn sites, they were quite offended and were absolutely sure that "Google is broken" and that I could "fix it."
I explained the situation to them (but there was a language barrier, not to mention a lack of the capability to understand much) and then reported it to my supervisor. When he encountered the person later (as they took an opportunity to attempt to complain about it), he explained to them the situation again, and said that if they didn't understand the simple concepts or could develop basic computer and internet skills and understanding, he had no position that they could fill.
I talk about stuff.
... but it's been in Windows in various incantations since fucking WINDOWS ME.
I mean, alert the presses!
I'm surprised at the low level of technological familiarity from Slashdot recently (gauging by the reaction to this article).
Low working knowledge about basic things like filesystems and disk management.
Christ...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Now I'll never be able to get rid of my ....uh... research.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
the idiot who submitted the article would be praising Apple. But since it is Microsoft, like typical Slashdotter, he has to find something to criticize about it.
I for one do not like this feature. I think this is a violation of privacy. This is worse than the government requiring modem manufacturers to build backdoors into their products. *sigh* now a days, it doesn't seem like anyone cares about freedom anymore. What happens if the government requires microsof to 'phone home' everything on the hard drive? I begin to wonder if anyone who has commented here is actually a real slashdotter, I think most would see this as a violation of privacy.
We've had this kind of ability since MS-DOS 6.22 (Maybe earlier?) and XP has this feature if the data resides on a 2003 server. Well, XP Pro anyways, not sure about Home. C'mon, can't you find a better reason to bash Microsoft, since we've had this for YEARS and YEARS before XP?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
gasmonso
/.
Please stop advertising your website in the body of your posts. It's already in your homepage spot. We don't need to see it twice.
Thanks,
This versioning in NT is based on a generic disk-snapshot system (similar to Linux's LVM, FreeBSD's gvinum stuff, Solaris DiskSuite, NetApp, etc. etc.)
The VMS versioning was done in the file system itself. This system (and many related systems) are done at a layer underneath the filesystem, and are often filesystem agnostic.
People like to say that Windows NT borrows a lot from VMS. That's like saying Linux borrows a lot from Multics. There isn't really _anything_ in common, but they are in the same spirit.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
If you're concerned about privacy:
THAN DON'T USE *&#^ING WINDOWS VISTA!
This sounds a lot like that creepy RAID technology that was put out a few years ago... it makes copies of everything you do!!
Why the negative spin? I kind-of like the idea of someone calling me in a panic having deleted an important file and me being able to recover it easily and get on to more interesting tasks.
If it is such a burden being unable to hide incriminating files, add a shred option to the recycle bin or context menu which will force the removal of previous versions as well. If anything, get rid of confirmation on deleting files if recovery is easy, and save the confirmation dialog for when someone right clicks a file and picks "shred".
Maxtor, Seagate, Samsung, Western Digital...
Windows is a mess. Look at all the files sittings at the top level (c:) after a fresh install.
I've got 13, and that's only because it's a boot drive:
Documents and Settings
Program Files
Recycler
System Volume Information
WINDOWS
autoexec.bat
boot.ini
config.sys
io.sys
msdos.sys
ntdetect.com
ntldr
Each of them has a good reason to be there. So what's your problem?
Now, while the Program Files and Windows directories are kind of tied together per installation (only limited by the installed program's abilities to re-instate themselves into the registry, which is a sadly lacking feature), the Documents and Settings folder (or rather, it's subfolders) are migratable.
So what now?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It's not like this feature tries to hide what it's doing. You can go in yourself and free up old snapshots and stuff, or turn it off completely (not that it really gives you any more privacy).
You do know that deleted files are really deleted anyway on any modern system, right?
I think you've lost your Slashdot user's license, please turn it in at the front desk and don't let the door hit you on the way out.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Where a totally useful system feature is painted as evil. Honestly, I know part of the member agreement at /. is to bash MS, but can't we stick to the legitimate issues instead of trying to villify every thing they do.
I'm sorry. You're allowed 5 punctuation errors and capitalization mistakes per post submitted to this website.
You are quite over that limited, and your spelling is atrocious. Please, leave and don't come back. Thanks.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
When Windows 95 and the recycle bin came out people said the same thing... "Now I have to delete files twice?". There were similarly paranoid ideas about people checking the recycle bin and forgetting to clean it out. Sure that happened but storing deltas isn't a bad idea just because someone got caught with porn or because a snooping boss notices that their deltas are sporadic, inferring irregular working pace. The benefits to recovering once data is seen as much greater win than any of these.
Linux should do this too (at least for the home directory). ReiserFS has potential for native filesystem support, this but so far as I know the best versioning systems out there use Subversion and WebDAV to present a web folder that's automatically versioned. Not exactly the easiest thing for non-techies to use. We should get this in the Linux file system.
Why's this modded interesting? It reads like a troll.
Steve Gibson's biggest contribution to security seems to be overblown hype.
If you're concerned, TURN IT OFF. If you're not, then it doesn't matter now does it?
Any decent outfit keeps backups, this is just a zero-setup decentralised version, so it's not making what you do on your work computer any less private.
The only potential problem I see (aside from performance issues and disc space usage - backing up that DVD ISO you're working on is going to HURT) is that making files harder to delete means that malware like viruses can persist more easily. Remeber the stories about "system restore" restoring virues? Hopefully antivirus companies are on the ball and will be able to scan old versions of files and remove them permanently.
It cost her about 5 hours. I told her that it was really not feasable to recover the data unless it was worth a lot of money. This feature would be really really nice in that office, and it wouldn't be used to spy on anyone. Sure, it CAN be used to spy on you, but I think you have options:
1. You can cackle madly at the time the sysadmin or bossman wastes looking at old versions of files.
2. Get a job that isn't poisoned by mistrust.
3. View porn at home?
4. View porn your boss likes!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
About as much as VMS, CVS, Subversion, or any other (file) system which tracks revisions. Look, people, not everything is a privacy concern. Chill out. This is actually something useful. It formalizes the fact that deletion does not (and never did) actually remove data. It all comes down to the level of protect you want. If you do not want others to recover your data, use encryption. Same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Join Tor today!
Or perhaps it could be exploited in some way by some nefarious person,
or even exploited in some nefarious way by some person.
Cue eerie music.
Don't disable this Windows option. Instead, stay paraonoid. It's more fun.
Perhaps someone may nefariously steal the hard drive from the computer and nefariously undelete data.
This business has come up time and again where opposing sides in a case are required to submit files that can be edited (as opposed to .PDF) to the Court or to the opposing side for joint submission to the Court. Idiots that leae the versions intact have lost more than a few cases that way.
I even heard a U.S. Magistrate Judge explain that MS Word files ALWAYS carried the prior versions along with the final version. For this information I received several hours of Continuing Legal Education credit...
Never underestimate the ability of a person to accidently give away information.
When VMS did the same thing, oh, what was it, two hundred years ago? You know, back when everything from your mastadon to the fire at the mouth of your cave ran on VMS. When they did it it was something new and interesting.
Why should I be excited that Windows is finally picking up a useful feature that was around before many of its developers were born?
But not until you delete them. C'est la vie.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
I see your point.
:-D ) It's to cover corner cases and disastrous events outside the data management model. It's less invasive than a recovery from backup too.
However I will submit the following counterpoints:
* It works across the entire file system, which creates questions about its efficiency:
A disk-wide snapshotting system will be less resource intensive that a system that has to make multiple, discrete metadata updates per write transaction. Since system restore is enabled by default on XP and I haven't heard much complaint about it performance-wise, I think this is a non-issue. (An exception might be systems that have very slow disks and limited RAM, like a palmtop).
* Its 'all or nothing' implementation does create significant liability in places like law offices, as other have already noted;
Enabling this system doesn't make you or your data more or less at risk. The reality is that old copies of files will stick around on disk for about as long as the Restore feature will keep old versioned copies. The difference between enabling and disabling the feature is whether you want to be able to _definitively_ access an old file or attempt a recovery with a tool booted from CD-ROM, which has to operate with less definitive metadata, and may only be able to give you a corrupted or incomplete copy.
Keep in mind that if you are concerned about hackers accessing your deleted files and you don't feel the need to use this service for recovery, the hacker will probably be able to resurrect enough of the files anyway for it to be moot.
That is, if you get penetrated by a hacker, the issue is moot. You are already in trouble. The real issue is whether you would like a safety net for legitimate recovery. Since the additional resources consumed are neglible, I would posit it would be foolish not to take advantage of it.
Furthermore, when deleting files, if you don't want anyone to get at them ever, then whether you use this system or not is irrelevant. Once you delete a file, you need to use a secure undelete facility to make sure all non-allocated space on your system is overwritten. Even with this undelete feature operational, such a tool will invalidate and overwrite ALL the restore points as well as free space. (That is because the facility gives up restore points when disk space gets tight, and the tool operates by attempting to fill up the entire disk with random data, thus it will demand-release all undeleted files, which will then be overwritten).
I would recommend you DISABLE the versioning feature before wiping a machine, to ensure all undeleted files are irrecoverable.
* It encourages laxness in data management; yet
* It doesn't seem to be rich enough to support proper change management processes.
That's not what this tool is for. You still need to have change management processes in place. The tool is for recovering files you didn't know were important! (Otherwise, why would a user delete it? If it were important he or she would have checked it into the Subversion repository, right?
But it would be foolish to rely on this facility alone. Just as it is foolish to rely on RAID alone for data security on the server side.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I've been considering going to Solaris (for a fileserver) largely because ZFS provides this same feature (along with a good RAID-5 implementation and live storage pool resizing). Of course, I'm not sure Windows is an ideal platform for a file server, particularly when the clients are likely to be Linux machines and Macs, but it gives me another option.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Most wiki software, including that used by Wikipedia stores every revision. Why not blow that up into a privacy concern also?
Join Tor today!
Auto system backup is such a good idea actually. Although like with the recycle bin there should be a way to delete a file and stop it from going to the shadow copies, that's what you do with shift+supr you know. I would love it to be oriented on file modiffications, sometimes one does silly things that he shouldn't be doing and figures out he has to repeat some work because he forgot to backup the files the previous day. It is an annoyance actually. I would like to see this feature in linux as well. Anyways MS should notify users about this . And then you can simply not store files that read "MY BOSS IS A COMPLETE DULL MORON" in your work computer , that should prevent problems with employers checking things out in the computers they actually own. It is not like you are supposed to use that computer to browser the web and read your personal email either. Seriously people. About big brother checking out files on your comp. Was it that easy to prevent that to happen before? They are really good at rebuilding data the FBI agents. Yes, they are.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Microsoft will include a feature in Vista that has already available in XP since 2003. On your own PC, you can turn it on or off. Your system administrator at work can turn it on or off. Your system administrator at work may also have any number of other activity-logging programs running on your computer.
*scrolls up to check who story was posted by, even though I already know* yup, Zonk.
Zonk, get a job.
In other news, Kenneth Lay's heart attack confirmed by new autopsy, found to be caused by shock from leaked secret Microsoft "undelete-feature" memo.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Does anyone know any good resources for switching to a mac?
I figure if I start now, by the time Vista hits the market, I won't need to care.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Being a sysadmin, I deal with end-users. About 6 months ago I got an email that said "Bob, I forgot to save an unedited copy of this form and overwrote the file with my data. Is there a way to retrieve the old file?" ... It happens and this previous version feature could be a great tool for us sysadmins if it's deployed correctly.
OTOH, I can definately understand the privacy issues -- especially if the user doesnt realize this is going on. A home user types their credit card data into a word document to save it temporarily and then deletes it when they are done with it and they think its gone, but its not.
What I dont understand is why Windows doesnt ask some of these questions on install (or on windows setup when you buy a name-brand computer and plug it in for the first time). It would seem that asking whether the user wants windows to do this for them would be a great compromise.
First of all, to Microsoft's credit, the user folder contains a registry, which is where per-user settings are stored (and this can be housed on a network share) so I don't think that's an issue. This has been a standard since NT 3.5.
/Group Policy set by an administrator.
Program authors have a lot to answer for, however. Many of them insist on tattooing settings into HKLM which really don't need to be there. They should consider putting settings in the program folder itself which are superceded by optional settings in HKLM
The ultimate no-no is when they put direct paths in the registry. Goodbye program relocatability.
However, some of the smarter software makers have started using REG_EXPAND_SZ settings in the registry at least, so at most what you need to do is modify an environment variable to point at the software's new installation root, and all the registry settings will work correctly post folder move.
This is encouraged but rarely followed. Oracle does this, believe it or not. And some programs like Matlab and foobar2000.
However, there is no cure in site for CLSID registrations. The whole thing is a mess, IMHO. I think the "answer" to that problem would be for every program to add a facility in a menu somewhere that re-sets all it's file associations in the users' CLSID section. This would be the one case of using RunOnce that I would tolerate. Have it run once at user login, and then only again after a user asks for associations to be reset.
And you can relocate the folders to alternate volumes. It's quite possible. See some of my other posts on how you can do this.
The only thing is you will probably need to keep a Program Files and Documents and Settings folder on the boot drive always. There are ways to fix that too but since the default windows installation puts and expects to find things there, you'd have a hard time with that.
But you certainly wouldn't need to back it up frequently (or at all).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"using a "wipe" utility to overwrite the file"
Oh, I'll fucking wipe it alright, and it'll stick too.
If you don't want the bossman seeing you're up to something evil, then don't be using the bossman's machine for something you shouldn't be. I have absolutely *NO* sympathy for anyone who does something on the company computer that is against policy or is at best questionable and then gets busted for it. If you want privacy, then use your own home machine.
It always amuses me to see how many people here would object to being told what to do on their own computer that they paid for, but they have no problem telling a company what they should do with a computer the company paid for.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I work for a major SAN/NAS vendor/manufacturer and this is just like our snapshot funtionality...
The snapshot makes a copy of the file allocation tables at a point in time and subsequent edits and creates don't overwrite blocks that are in-use by existing snapshots.
So, when you restore a snapshot you're just overwriting the existing FAT with a copy of the previous state of the file system.
When a snapshot expires, the blocks which are being reserved by the snapshot are released to the file system to be overwritten as necessary...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
This kind of feature is just another example of Microsoft iron-fisting the market and crushing competition.
...much like Windows.
I demand the freedom to drop another $60-90 on 3rd-party "utility" software that will either have an annual license, or won't be updated again for four years.
Oh, how I miss Peter Norton's playful scowl...
For the benefit of future article submissions, I've predicted a few headlines from the coming future and offer the required Slashdot twist:
Windows 2010 Ships with IPv6 as Default
- becomes -
Windows 2010 Foresakes Legacy IPs
Microsoft Office 2009 Ships with Photoshop Competitor
- becomes -
Microsoft Cheats Adobe Out of Millions, Again
Microsoft Ergonomic Mouse Helps Corrects Carpal Syndrome
- becomes -
Microsoft Mouse Locks Out Porn
Asheron's Call VII Goes Alpha
- becomes -
700 Bugs Detected in Asheron's Call VII
Please add your own.
-David
I'm astonished at the number of folks who
... or what?
a) see this as a Godsend (do you really empty your recycle bin daily
b) see this as Satanic (did you forget about the recycle bin?)
Personally, I only bother with the trash bin about once a year at work. Because I got a new box in January with a 200GB hard-drive, I may never bother looking in the trash directory again, as my chances of filling up the drive with text files in the next 5 yrs are pretty freaking remote, even if we do get forced to use MS-VISTA + MS-Orofice + MS-Abcess. [Section self-censored for drifting off topic.]
Personally, I really don't see this "feature" as useful, but then, I don't go around wantonly deleting files, or important sections of critical files. Fortunately, we retain enough marginal freedom that I can use what I want to at home and that's Linux and FreeBSD. At work it's the boss' call. At home... it's mine.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
it could be exploited in some nefarious way by some nefarious person
What can't? I say we ban cheese, because if you melt it you could drown people in it. And cotton, because you can suffocate if it is used to block your breathing. And cows, because if they are dropped from an airplane onto a person they could kill them. We need to ban people too, since they can do bad stuff. And animals, since they do too. And plants, since they can die and catch on fire. And fire! And what if the Earth crashed into an alien planet? Do we need to ban the Earth too?
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
As a business, you decide how to balance reliability of data against the ability of it to be used against you. If you were really parinoid, you could have all important data stored on a single desktop on an encrypted file system which had a password nobody knew, wired to something that zaps the HD if it's moved, behind locked doors and etc, etc. I can just about gaurentee that no matter what, nobody is swiping that data. On the other hand, it would take very little screw up and you've lost it all.
So this is the kind of thing yu think about. Do we want this enabled on normal employee workstations? If not, turn it off. It's optional, and it is the job of your IT guys to be aware of it, and know how to manage it if you want.
I just don't see any problem here.
You found the hidden spelling mistake!
You can stay.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
MS's job isn't to make you, the geek happy. MS's job is to make as many people as they can as happy as possible. So let's say they develop a new awesome feature that they think nromal users will really like. However, they know normal users aren't smart enough to turn it on by themselves (this is easy to prove). They have two choices:
1) Disable it by default. This makes a few geeks who know about it and want it happy, more geeks who know aobut it but don'want it indifferent, and doesn't help normal users at all. It's almost worth just leaving out.
2) Enable it by default. This makes some geeks who don't want it a bit annoyed, but makes everyone else happy.
Gee, hard choice. Look, if you want an OS that does nothing by default, get a different OS. Run OpenBSD or something. You won't spend any less time configuring it than you will configuring Windows, you'll just spend that time turning things on rather than off.
Really I fail to see the problem. If you only do it occasionally, it's just a few more minutes of system configuration. I do a hell of a lot of customization to personal systems, it doens't bother me the time I spend turning the things I don't want off. If you do it a lot, develop a system to automate it. There's plenty of ways including customized Windows installs. Don't whine because you haven't done the research to automate tasks for you.
Because MS is an everyman based OS, they need to have the useful stuff turned on by default because normal users won't do it. It's like automatic updates. I don't like them to install on my personal system automatically because I many have something going. So I set it to wait till I give the ok. However it needs to be on by default for normal users. Why? Well otherwise they won't update it. Just today I had to update an XP system that was pre SP2 still. Why? No auto updates. Users didn't know they needed anything, just thought it should take care of itself.
Same shit here. If you don't need file version tracking because you make your own backups, you are smart enough to know how ot turn it off. If you don't know how to turn it off, it's probably a feature you should leave on.
This was an awesome feature in VMS,
and a privacy concern in Vista.
Those of us who have used versioning in filesystems or elsewhere think this is a pretty nice feature, even if we prefer other OS'es. So I would say not nearly so many people are against Microsoft on this one (or at least agree with the summary).
Now if you really wanted to see a storm of negativity from Slashdot imagine what would happy if Sony announced this feature on the PS3!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's interesting they've announced it now, just after the grand failure of their voice recognition demo. I bet they have a pool of cool features to announce just after events like that, to distract people from events they wouldn't like them to remember.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
Rumour has it that deleting files securely will be possible with the new Vista tool double-the-killer-delete.exe.
I have a similar feature using a third party trashcan replacement tool. .PSD files have been worth it.
Works great; handy for restoring a version you accidentaly replaced. It does need to be emptied more often but the few times I needed to retrieve overwritten
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I'm waiting for the first virus to take advantage of this "undelete" feature: I bet its name will be "Double The Killer Delete"
Article is misleading: there's no "undeletion" here. Windows is merely taking a snapshot of the state of the mountpoint every x minutes and providing a simple interface to it.
Incidentally it is very easy to set this up under samba (on Linux) too - just use LVM, setup a cron job to take a snapshot (no downtime or disk thrashing) and create a mount point. Install the free extension for Windows XP (or hey, if you've got Vista you've got this installed already) and you're done.
Very useful feature.
---
Sometimes it's just too funny reading Slashdot. :-)
... in Linux, it would be something like ...
:-p
Microsoft Adds Risky System-Wide Undelete to Vista
Ubuntu To Bring Journalling to the Masses
All this is, is a UI to better exploit NTFS journalling.
All people thinking this was a security concern now must have lived under a false sense of security before undelete was built-in. Deleting files rarely ever made them unrecoverable, at least in Windows, and I doubt many other systems as well. And whether living under a false sense of security is better or not, I guess that can be debated.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
What about the disk space the feature conusmes ? Will Windows eat all of my harddrive for this ?
This is 100% pure anti-Microsoft FUD.
/did I mention VMS having the same feature?
Anyone that knows enough about the feature to think this is a privacy concern knows enough about the feature to protect themselves from it.
Anyone that doesn't know enough to protect themself, doesn't know it exists, and won't care.
And.. yaknow.. if writing objectionable Word documents is the worst of your offenses.. well.. I think you're safe. Unless you're writing detailed directions for the assassination of a highly placed company or government official.
Then again, I guess you could be coming up with Excel documents showing how you can rip the company off for bazillions of dollars, but if you're smart enough to figure that out, I don't think backups of your spreadsheets are gonna be what nails you.
-l
... removing from users all responsibility for how they use their computers.
This is an example of M$ "helping" people who cannot think for themselves and who cannot take responsibility for their own actions.
Surely if a user wanted to keep previous versions of a document than said user would save the newer version with a different file name!
Just imagine what would happen to free space on the server once there starts to be multiple versions of multiple documents being kept by the operating system - and even when the user deletes the document!
Just mod down every post you see from him. He'll soon be posting at -1 and maybe then he'll get the message and quit being such an annoying little boy-whore.
Regards,
Cowboy Neal.
I have to keep track of a few versions of my documents. I end up having a
document1
document2
document3
document2.1
document2.2
document2.3
document2.4
etc... ant it's a pain to keep track of them. I've been wanting to make my entire Linux system be a subversion repository.
I just hope that microsoft allows for atomized complete deletion. Sort of like emptying the recycle bin.
If not, somebody will come out with a "must have utility" that will integrate nicely with the shell and everybody can be happy.
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
Sounds a lot like GoBack to me.
Honestly, I like the idea of version-tracking, being able to back-track to a previous save with little hassle.
Those who are worried about the boss man finding something out about their work habits / quality or whatever either need to think about working harder (or at all) or finding a new job.
The only real problem(s) I see with this is disk usage both from storing version history (depends how intelligently they do differencing & how well they can compress diffs), perhaps performance (especially on large files) and the inability to fully delete a file (mainly because of excessive disk usage, but perhaps also for security reasons).
Overall, I like this.. Why am I always opposed to popular opinion?
Will program for karma.
I've been wanting to make my entire Linux system be a subversion repository.
Have a look at FUSE. Maybe it can already do what you want.
I remember VAX/VMS having version control. Filenames were in the form of FILENAME.EXT;nn where nn was a number from 1 to 99 {initially; later versions upped it to 32767} and you could {theoretically at least, though nobody ever did in practice; everyone just ran with the default settings} set on a file-by-file or directory-by-directory basis how many versions to retain. You could PURGE out old versions {essential when we had a disk quota of 5MB, even with a default version_limit of 3} and reset the counter back to 1.
This definitely has got the potential to bite some unsuspecting person in the arse. But so have most things.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Well yet again the primitive file systems of PC operating systems makes me smile.
I've spent large parts of my working life using Fujitsus (ex ICL) Virtual Machine Environment (VME) which features file generations. When you edit a file you don't overwrite the original, you create a new generation when you save the edit.
That way you can always go back to previous generations should you so desire. Need to remove all the old generations ? Simple, call "DELETE_FILE_GENERATIONS" optionally supplying the number of old generations you wish to keep (default none) Obviously any process which accesses a file will always get the highest generation of the file - unless of course a specific generation is required. So for instance opening a file to read it can be performed by the following call:
OPEN_FILE(NAME=SOMEFILE,LNAME=QQ)
Or should you want to open generation 23 of SOMEFILE you'd call:
OPEN_FILE(NAME=SOMEFILE(23),LNAME=QQ)
It's such a beautifully simple idea that I can't understand why it didn't catch on in other operating systems. In comparison having a single copy of each file is utterly primitive and no amount of undelete type facilities make up for the fact it's just a crap design.
File generations should be the way of the future.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Would have been a bit more useful than a bloody DOS box.
Its called Unix.
Cheese sandwiches can be utilized in some nefarious way by some nefarious person. Therefore, cheese sandwiches have been made illegal!
This would be great if it was, for example, its own "type of folder" or something to that effect. Then, every document kept in that folder would have version tracking on. This way it becomes easier to manage, save space on disk for documents that aren't important, and its not a big of an inconvenience.
Just my 2 cents.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.
I see lots of misconception of how FATFS deletion works, therefore I'm posting here what I hope is a comprehensive explanation of how it works.
First, you can go to my site and find FATFS specification from the developer's documention section.
You will also find a description of a directory entry.
Please note I'm differenciating between FATFS and FAT, FAT being a component of FATFS.
FATFS is divided in System Zone, FAT, and allocatable blocks (clusters). Before FAT32FS, root directory was also treated specially (a remain from DOS 1.0 when directories were unavailable).
FAT is a singly linked string list of blocks, and the first block is stored in the directory entry. As a practical example, a directory entry says that file first block is at b1. You look at FAT[b1]=b2 to get next block or an EOF mark. Then you read FAT[b2]=b3 to get next block and so on. It's quite inefficient with big fragmented FS because you need to seek only to get the block list. It was OK at the time of DOS 1.0 because the FAT size of a 360KiB floppy would only use one KiB and could be stored permanently in RAM.
When deleting a file, it's correct that only the first char is changed (to 0xE5) in the directory entry, but the allocation string in the FAT is also erased - because it's the only mean for FATFS to know that those blocks are available.
First block of erased file is still retrievable because it is stored in the directory entry, but other blocks can't, you can only guess, because if a file isn't fragmented, FAT[i]=i+1, and file size is stored in directory entry so you know when to stop.
On most other filesystems, a directory entry points to an inode, which in turn contains all the allocation string (maybe using indirection blocks). Free blocks are written in another structure, an allocation bitmap. So when you're erasing a file on those FS, you only need to erase the directory entry (filename is lost), free blocks in the allocation bitmap(s), free inode in the inode bitmap. You don't need to touch at the inode itself. Therefore, if you have the inode number (instead of the file name) it's in fact easier and more reliable to undelete files on those filesystems than with a FATFS. Except ext3fs zeroes inode block list (but it works on ext2fs).
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
I've had this sort of netapp functionality at home ever since I worked for a company that used it for their home directories. In your $HOME, you'd have a folder ".snapshot" containing hourly.0, hourly.1 (etc) directories that had a snapshop of your homedir at that time.
You can set this up very easily using RIBS. It uses rsync and extfs hard links to emulate complete snapshots of your home dir. I cannot recommend this enough; knowing that you can delete/trash any data and have a reliable backup there is quite liberating.
"Some users will find the feature objectionable because it could give the bossman a new way to check up on employees, or perhaps it could be exploited in some nefarious way by some nefarious person"
Hum! i think a company that OWNS the computer and PAYS their employee to WORK has a god damn right to make sure people aren't wasting their time having their entire photo album on their computer or music or other personal material whatsoever and that goes for network shares too.
If a company can filter e-mails of their employees i think they can also filter the content of what they are copying unto their machines.
Keep your stuff at home if you dont want prying eyes invading your computer at work.
or perhaps it could be exploited in some nefarious way by some nefarious person.
... ... ... ... everything.
...
This is exactly why we NEED to outlaw
Someone might use it for
[mermaid man]
*EVIL*!!!!
[/mermaid man]
Novell has had a feature like this since the mid eighties and called it salvage.
It would keep deleted files until it needed the space.
The MS version seems to do this and on every file save that you do.
From what I know of Volume Shadow it is a pain to restore a deleted file because you need to know the file name or you are SOL.
Imagine how much longer a defrag will now take with this feature.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
"Some users will find the feature objectionable because it could give the bossman a new way to check up on employees"
.. and recover the file without troubling the administrator"
What's stoping the bossman from going back through the tape archive and doing the same thing?
"or perhaps it could be exploited in some nefarious way by some nefarious person"
That shouldn't present a problem assuming that file system security can't be bypassed.
"When you access a Shadow Copy, the file and folder ACLs still apply "
"VSS takes a snapshot (aka Shadow Copy) of the state of content stored on selected volume shares"
Could get the same functionality using rsync and using symlinks for files that haven't changed. Building up a number of virtual directories.
"the user can simply view
I recall Vax/VMS saved a different version each time the file was saved. Such functionality built directly into the file system. I read here that Xerox PARC got their first with something called Cedar.
"In Cedar, files were immutable; writing to a file produced a new version of the file and file names included a version number (e.g., filename! 10). A similar idea was found in the RSX, VMS [2], and TOPS-10/-20 [6] operating systems from Digital."
davecb5620@gmail.com
Actually, I kinda liked VMS's built in versioning. Then again, it was the first mini-mainframe I worked with, and it was a welcome change from DOS. Heck, VMS's versioning saved my arse more than once, and I recall how I always wished my MS os would do the same thing. (OK, it wasn't limited to only MS OSes, but it was definitely the first, as there were few other options during this time period.)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
If this was a Linux feature you can be certain it would be tooted as the best thing ever.
If I really want a file system to keep track of changes over time, I would make one or more folders into a SVN repository and use SVN to track the changes. Now maybe SVN could do with some fancier GUI features to make this all transparent to the user: having a FUSE-based setup to make the SVN repository look just like a normal filesystem would be ideal.
So really the argument here is not that this set of shadow-copies for undelete is bad. It's hardly a new feature. The argument once again is do the users know how to use this feature for their advantage and can they really control it fully? My main reason for using Linux is having potentially complete control over my own computer:
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Enable it by default. This makes some geeks who don't want it a bit annoyed, but makes everyone else happy.
:)
Actually, in the case of Microsoft's products of the past decade, it's led to an amazing number of worms that have made front page headlines, and caused (by some estimates) billions of dollars in lost productivity.
The Microsoft attitude of "enable by default", for *normal users*, is what has turned them into the laughing stock of the industry. Too bad everyone still gives them money
SOME things should be turned on by default, no question - automatic updates, etc. MOST things shouldn't - history shows this pretty clearly.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
When Microsoft adds a feature to its product, everyone fears it's some sort of privacy concern... but when the largest storage manufacturers in the world have been doing it for well over 10 years (Network Applicance's snapshots? [EMC may even call it snapshots too])... it's an awesome administrative feature that provides massive ROI and ROE to disk administrators.
"System-wide undelete", also known as filesystem snapshotting, has been available for years in various incarnations, both native to Linux (and other operating systems) and as part of NAS storage devices.
Why the hell is it suddenly bad when Microsoft does it? (Hint: it isn't.) What the hell are you doing on your PC at work that could get you fired if your boss found out?
FUD indeed.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
When, oh when can we expect these babies to stop spewing random propeganda and negative spinning simply because they personally don't like a company, or a product. Wake the fuck up guys. Nobody gives a shit about your personal fucking opinion in your headlines, or in your "Tagging (beta)" retarded tags. Try tagging it with Microsoft, or Vista, so...I dunno, maybe so people could fucking use it to find things? The only way to find anything out about Microsoft, Windows or Vista is to look for "fud", "itsatrap" or any of the other fuckwitted, personal opinion-esque, means-absolutely-nothing tags.
We've got a VMS guy that works here that I'm sure will find this retarded healine verbage hilarious. Well done on another fine example of bringing the news to the world. Cheers.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays!
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
You're right-- this problem exists in other formats. Like, say, Photoshop.
I have a friend who decided to make a major career change from being a network administrator for a university to... a porn photographer. At the time, I was the resident Photoshop whiz around, so he asked me if I would help him make his business cards. I said I would, but I never got around to it, so he sat down and tried to figure the program out himself. After adding various nude models to his card to come up with a template for a silhouette (want to be tasteful here, right?), he submitted the card to the offset printer.
Unfortunately for him, the printer was not amused. Apparently, due to his unfamiliarity with Photoshop, he left all of those nude photos in there-- in hidden layers. When the printer output the file, out came these prinouts covered in naked women. The printer refused to print the cards, and he eventually had to find another printer. Oops.
Sounds like the folks in Redmond discovered an old VAX with VMS. More than 10 years, whenever you saved a file, DEC's VMS would automatically incriment the verion field and save a new copy of the file. Normally, you just worked with the latest version but you could always go back to previous versions (that is, if you had not purged them).
I wonder if MS is going to try to patent this feature?
Proceed @ 11.5740741uHz
Proceed @ 11.5740741uHz
this is a mess waiting to happen.
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
You know, this is a pet peeve of mine. I feel like everytime I see a new feature added to Windows Server, and alot of times Linux, the feature was implemented and working in Netware ages ago. For example, Volume Shadow Copy. I remember seeing a commercial for how great VSS was (some IT guy showing some people around or something) and I wanted to say "1990 called and it wants its killer feature back". Netware has had salvage abilities at the filesystem level for ages.d =15817875
I feel like I want to write a comment about all the great things Novell has implemented because if you ask them they wont tell you. Its bizarre. They have all these great things and they just dont market them at all. If they invented the cure for cancer that cost $2 they'd lock it away in a bunker under Utah in a room labled 'Warning: Angry Weasels'.
There have been dozens of discussions here about what needing an LDAP directory server and all these people recommend AD or some sort of kludgey OpenLDAP + whatever solution. NDS, which is now eDirectory, has been around for atleast 12 years now and is the best directory service in the world. Don't like Netware? It runs on everything - Windows, Linux, Windows, Netware, Solaris, AIX and probably some other platforms I cannot name right now. Nobody who deals with this stuff at an enterprise level will tell you that eDirectory is not the best directory service in the world.
Microsoft is talking about version services. In a business environment users should NEVER be saving data to their local computers. Many companies sell versioning software for server but I wrote a comment below about a Novell feature called Archive and Versioning Services - http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192625&ci
Need to resize your volume because you just added a new NAS - just fire up the handy web interface, click the button to assign the storage to the storage pool and then click the little checkbox to grow the volume to the storage pool. Reboot? whats that?
I have workd to do but you get the idea. Spend some time looking around their website and you'll see everything they have. Most of it can be downloaded for a free demo.
Combining this with Speech Recognition:
user:"Undelete this file"
vista:"unknown command undulate, no wi in fi"
user:"restore old version"
vista:"Going to MS online store. No new olsen twins tracks"
user:"fucking dammit, give me the file from yesterday"
vista:"This system has parental controls enabled. Please contact your parents"
user:"@#ç$!&%".....
Seriously, though, this is a nice feature, but I can see it chomping through users' 250GB disks like a hummer goes through gas.
I don't get the privacy concern. If someone gains physical access to your machine, then the contents are vulnerable unless you take active steps to prevent it.
Physical access is not required for privacy violation in this case. The EULA which kindly grants you permission to use your M$ crippled computer also grants M$ the right to search it at will. While they might finally be sharing some of the fruits of this search with you, it does not mean they are sharing it all or that you should want it in the first place. When you connect it to a network, your indexed thoughts and works can be sent to M$ for them to sell to the highest bidder.
This is really just a detail and variation on a longstanding truism. The OS is not free, so you will never really know what it's doing and it should not be trusted. The details of that violation are less important than awareness of the problem.
It's only a neat feature if it can be trusted.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Truly, MS is damned if they do, damned if they don't.
No, people just remember the EULA and other things M$ does. This is the company who's EULA grants them full search and delete rights to your files for use of their OS. It's also the company that demands encrypted communications with your computer on a daily basis. Fear of them abusing that power is well founded based on their previous treatment of partners, competitors and customers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What kind of reasonable privacy expectations should people have on a work computer?
Expectations of privacy are reasonable but unrealistic. You will be violated at work and you will also be violated at home.
Once upon a time, it was against the law to wiretap phones because they were part of a larger public network. Computers have somehow skipped around that and many large companies now feel free to treat their employees like prisons treat inmates.
Even if you don't believe in treating your employees with dignity, the threat of industrial espionage should not be discounted. Do you really trust Microsoft enough to index and parse all of your employee's work? I don't and I don't trust them to be able to keep it to themselves even if they did lack malicious intent. This "feature" creates a standard location for every industrial espionage program to mine. If M$ does not have a buyer for your information, someone else might.
Ignoring such altruistic issues as company loyalty, you reach the obvious conclusion that the same feature will be at home too. Companies can pay a staff to vainly try to block abuse of their networks. Home users will simply take the bad deal they have as long as they feel compelled to use M$ junk. "Savvy" users will add this to the very long list of chores owning a M$ computer brings with it, anti-virus, firewall administration, monthly re imaging and so on and so forth ad nausea.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There are not steps you can take to protect yourself other than to use free software. Microsoft has granted itself the right to violate you, and you agreed to it. They can do it anytime they want through the daily encrypted communications they demand with your computer.
Physical access is not required for privacy violation. The EULA which kindly grants you permission to use your M$ crippled computer also grants M$ the right to search it at will. While they might finally be sharing some of the fruits of this search with you, it does not mean they are sharing it all or that you should want it in the first place. When you connect it to a network, your indexed thoughts and works can be sent to M$ for them to sell to the highest bidder.
This is really just a detail and variation on a longstanding truism. The OS is not free, so you will never really know what it's doing and it should not be trusted. The details of that violation are less important than awareness of the problem.
It's only a neat feature if it can be trusted. In this case, it can't and it's not.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Good god, that is absolutely hilarious. That's why I come to slashdot - the super-funny comedians. Thanks a lot for increasing the signal to noise ration of this discussion. We sure needed it.
This person posted the same thing again because it was modded down. He is obviously trying to game the system.
Microsoft has taken so much out of Vista basically making it XP with a new interface. So far, it is hardly worth the update. No sense paying Microsoft all that money for a copy of a DRM infested product. If you think spying is bad now it is only going to get worse under Vista.
But all in all, it is a pretty attractive interface. The beta is extremely buggy. Virtually all features have serious problems. Accessing a SATA drive from allegedly support drivers/chipsets can still take you 30 seconds or longer to open a directory you were previously in but move away from and want to move back into. The network 100mb transfer rate is extremely slow. The same machine with XP works flawlessly at a nice speed. Wireless is essentially non-functional on most of my machines. The Aero interface is only working a the highest end 128mb cards when it should easily work on any card with 128mb of video ram. That 128mb requirement is more than some games for a simple interface.
But, aside from all that Vista has been trashed so badly with components being removed that Microsoft has felt that they need to insert features to make it seem so less bare-bones.
Even so, that feature is poorly implemented and weak and will fill people's drives with unwanted overhead and make a storage facility for spyware/adware/malware to hide--just like system restore.
It is essentially a non-feature for an OS lacking any real feature updates.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
If this was a Linux feature you can be certain it would be tooted as the best thing ever.
It's a misconception that Linux is somehow in a race with Microsoft about features or innovation. In fact, this feature, like just about every supposed "innovation" in Vista is already supported by Linux. The reason you don't hear about it much is because it's actually not very useful.
The way features get into Windows is that some Microsoft engineer thinks he has a bright idea, convinces management, and then it gets shipped and marketed, and then it's supported for years to come; all of that is largely independent of whether the feature is useful or not
The way features get into Linux is that some people implement something, users start using it, distributions notice that the feature is being used and pick it up. The Linux process makes it much more likely that stuff that's in the distributions is stuff people actually want.
I find it reassuring that Zonk is not intimate with the details of Windows. This is not to imply that Zonk is intimate with anything ...
The feature described appears to be just another way for Microsoft to sell lots of servers.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
Substitute it for any document workflow (ClearCase, RUP, SourceSafe (bleh), Unison).
I think it's still good to have an explicit workflow system in addition to having incremental backups AND the previous versions feature.
ALL THREE! Booyah. Oh, and ya gotta mail archives off to some remote site office in case of pirate ninja terra-ists.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
If Peter Denning, bless his heart, were to study the Linux kernel for a few more months, he'd be able to start teaching and writing about it too. (Specifically, in addition to the OS design classes he already teaches).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
In that, the VSS service notifies applications with open files _on the volume_ to checkpoint themselves before the snapshot. But it doesn't really understand NTFS at all. It can interface with the FS API though to get usage informations and to send notification events.
Anyhoo yeah it's still up to the applications to take the hint and flush their buffers and stuff. The filesystem can't do that for them. Otherwise it might as well wipe their collective asses while it's at it, if you know what I mean.
It won't corrupt your files overall. If you are running an I/O intensive process to a specific file during a snapshot that file may end up useless. But the rest of your stuff will be valid.
And didn't anyone tell you that 'Ak*' is an unlucky family name to have?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Nothing "was" about it. VMS is still under active development. Version 8.3 has just finished wide beta. http://www.hp.com/go/vms has all the details. VMS -- 29 years and still counting.
---------- Stanley F. Quayle, P.E. N8SQ Toll free: 1-888-I-LUV-VAX http://www.stanq.com/charon-vax.html