At one point or another most of us have accidentally deleted a file or folder on our systems, hopefully you have a good backup and your IT team can recover the file for you. But this takes time of course, wouldn’t it be good if there were a way to retrieve the file yourself?
Volume Shadow Copy or VSS has been available since Windows Server 2003 and what this does is take a snap shot of your network drives at set points, this then allows you to look at previous versions of files. If this has been set up on your servers, or if you are using one of the later operating systems such as Windows 7 or Vista then you can access previous versions of your folders via the Explorer screen. Once you have opened up Windows Explorer simply find the folder that contained the file or folder that you deleted and highlight it, then right click on your mouse and select properties.
Screen shot of previous versions of folder
Once of the tabs that will be revealed will be “Previous Versions” clicking on this will offer you a selection of previous versions of the folder which you can look through and find the files that you are missing.
These are the files that are recoverable in this folderFrom here you can then restore them or save them to where you want and hey presto you have your file or folder back again and without going to the tape backup.
Make sure that you have your VSS turned on and set to take snapshots correctly so that the next time you accidentally lose some data you can get it back again quickly and easily. If you need help then look here for how you can get help to set this up correctly.