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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."
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.
Microsoft got this one much more directly. Windows NT started out as basically the next version of VMS, designed and written almost entirely by former DECies (one rumor has it that the "NT" came from taking VMS and adding one to each letter to get WNT...) VMS has had a feature like this for years. It predates not only OS/X, but the Macintosh in general. I can remember using in about 1981 or so -- I don't remember for sure, but VMS 3 is what sticks in my mind -- and I don't think it was new then (it seemed pretty cool to me after dealing with Control Data mainframes, but the people who'd been using VMS longer didn't seem to think of it as new or exciting).
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
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.
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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.
The VMS filesystem (Files 11) was an evolution of earlier DEC filesystems and had versioning buit in from the start. There's also a more user-oriented versioning filesystem which has been in development for Linux for the past few years.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/versionfs/
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
Actually, I'd be more worried about what can be discovered in a lawsuit - the raw ruminations of some employee could be very damaging - whether or not they were correct. This makes it harder to destroy working papers. In the old days, we kept all our working papers on a disk and then destroyed the disk along with our hard copy working papers - that way no one had to worry about what could be dredged up in a lawsuit.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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
That feature is seriously screwed up. Microsoft are *still* trying to sell people on the idea that its ok to share around the editable document, when in reality its hardly ever ok. All it takes is for one person to forget to remove hidden data and you're on the news.
Look at the list of Office products it integrates with - there's one missing. Outlook. Why isn't outlook set up to prompt you to ask if it should strip the documents before sending? Why is there no feature on exchange to block emails leaving the domain with unstripped attachments? Why doesn't iis block access to unstripped files? Now those would make it a feature worth having.
Stepping back from MS for a moment, the same problem actually exists in many other file types - even html (meta tags and comments). Its why the microformats movement thinks metadata should be presentable and parsable rather than hidden in 'document properties'. Their solution isn't complete though - we need to separate the notions of 'Save As' and 'Publish'. One way to achieve this in a corporate/government environment would be for servers to require digital signatures on outgoing documents - this would introduce publication into a document lifecycle for the purpose of integrity, at which point we can hook in 'strip doc' wizards to minimize risk.
Just thinking out loud.