What’s the first thing that you do when you are back from a vacation or from a family wedding? You probably connect the digital camera to your computer and transfer the photographs (a better word would be "memories") from the camera to your hard-drive.

You’ve following this routine for quite some time and, as a result, a few hundred thousand photographs reside on your computer now neatly tagged and arranged in folders. But wait, do you have a backup plan for these "priceless" digital photos?

How to Backup your Digital Photos

There are basically four ways by which you can backup your photos at home:

1. Backup your photos on CDs and DVDs – This is a cheap and easy option but please remember that disks have a finite shelf life so pictures that you burn today on to a DVD disk may not be accessible after few years.

2. Use an external hard drive – You can get a portable 500 GB drive for less than $100, they connect to your computer via USB (or Firewire) ports but again, you can’t expect an external hard drive to last forever.

3. Use Network Storage – If you have pictures across multiple computers, you can use a network attached storage (NAS) device like HP’s MediaSmart Home Server* or Apple’s Time Capsule to automatically backup all your digital content in one place.

The HP device can transfer files to Amazon S3 so you have an added layer of protection.

4. Use an online backup services – You can use photo-sharing websites (like Flickr) or an online backup service (like Mozy) to put your photos on to the "cloud" and access them from any other computer.

For most users, the best option for preserving digital photographs is often "online backup" because it doesn’t require you to burn DVDs (which are unreliable anyway), you don’t have to invest in any new hardware and your photos are likely to last forever as long as you pay the yearly bills.

Online Backup for your Digital Photos

There are again four different routes for online backup:

# 1. Online backup services like Mozy that offer unlimited storage and allow not just photographs but files of all types.

# 2. Photo-sharing services like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums that allow you to store both photographs and video clips online.

# 3. File-synchronization services like Dropbox, SugarSync or Windows Live Mesh.

# 4. Online storage services like Amazon S3 or Windows Live SkyDrive.

What should you use?

Well, photo-sharing sites allow you to visually browse pictures in the web browser itself while a backup service like Mozy will first require you to download the photos on to the computer before you can show them to your visiting grand-parents.

File-synchronization services like Live Mesh not only provide online backup but they also save a copy of your digital files (pictures in this case) on to your other computers so even if your main hard-drive suffers a crash, you can quickly retrieve files from the other computers.

The Cost of Online Storage for Digital Photos

If you only have a few hundred photos on your computer that occupy anywhere between 1-2 GB of storage space, you can enjoy any of above backup services for free but if your storage requirements are slightly more, you probably need to for a paid version.

Now here’s a visual graph that compares the storage cost of various online backup services where you can safely store your priceless photos.

Flickr Pro costs around $25 an year and you can store unlimited number of pictures here though the maximum size of individual pictures should not exceed 20 MB (bad for professional photographs who shoot in RAW – see comments).
Picasa Web Albums on the other hand lets you purchase storage on-demand so you only pay $5 per year for 20 GB of online storage but end-up paying $100 for 400 GB of storage. Like Flickr, images uploaded to Picasa Web Albums can be no larger than 20MB and are restricted to 50 megapixels or less.
Live Skydrive is the best online storage service – it offers 25 GB of free space (50 MB limit for individual files) and that should be enough for most home users. You can upload picture libraries from your desktop to Windows Live SkyDrive using the free Windows Live Photo Gallery client though it’s only available for Windows.
Online backup services like Mozy cost around $60 per year respectively but here you get unlimited storage, your files are automatically backed up (in the background) and there are no restrictions on file-size.
SmugMug, another popular photo-sharing site, offers a service called SmugVault that uses Amazon S3 to backup your photos, videos and all other file-types that you can imagine. They have a relaxed 600 MB per file limit and you pay the normal Amazon S3 rent for files that are not photos.
Amazon S3, where you pay only for what you use, is very reliable (their SLA promises 99.9% uptime) turns out to be very expensive if your yearly storage requirement exceeds 10 GB.

Here’s another representation of the same graph – Yearly costs (in $) vs. storage offered (in GB).
Windows Live SkyDrive offers 25 GB of online storage space for your pictures for free though there’s no option to purchase extra storage. In paid services, Google’s Picasa offers the best value for money if your photo collection can fit in 20 GB else a Flickr Pro account probably makes more sense.

Picasa desktop software makes it easy for you to upload and download photos from Picasa Web Albums. Flickr provides an uploading utility but you need to rely on a third-party hacks to download the original (full-resolution) albums from Flickr.

If your computer is running a fairly new operating systems, such as Windows XP, Vista or even Mac OS X, chances are that it won’t be able to play any of the old DOS games that were originally designed for 16-bit systems.
There are however simple workarounds that will help you play your favorite DOS games on any modern computer just the way they worked on old 486 machines of the 90’s. The other good part is that you can download most popular DOS games from the web for free and legally.

Play Old DOS Games on your Computer

The easiest way to run DOS games on your computer is through DOSBox.

DOSBox, in simple English, is a free program that emulates an X86 based DOS environment on your new computer including speaker sounds, video graphics and other hardware. DOSBox is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X so you can practically use it to run DOS games on practically every computer.

You can simply install DOSBox via the command line but if that sounds too technical, there are graphical frontends for DOSBox that will let you run DOS programs through a simple GUI.

One of the most popular GUI frontends for DOSBox is D-Fend Reloaded. You can install this program like any other Windows application and it is ready for use immediately after the installation. To install a DOS game, simply use the import wizard or drag-and-drop the zip archive file (that contains the DOS program) into the D-Fend Reloaded window.

D-Fend Reloaded also offers game packages, containing both freeware and shareware DOS games, that you may install on your computer at once using a simple installer. You can play these classic games using DOSBox without having to configure anything.

Build an MS-DOS Virtual Machine for Playing Games

If the requirements are such that DOSBox emulators are unable to run your favorite DOS game, you can try running DOS inside a virtual machine using virtualization software like Windows Virtual PC, VMWare Player, or VirtualBox from Sun – they are all free solutions.

Microsoft offers a free copy of MS-DOS operating system that you may convert into a virtual machine or you can download the FreeDOS program from the Internet which is just like MS-DOS and completely free.

Once you have a virtual machine running DOS, you need a way to install DOS programs into the virtual machine. This can be done by burning a CD image of the DOS games and then attaching that CD image to the virtual machine.

Play DOS Games Online in the Browser

The installers for DOS games were initially distributed on floppy disks and the game authors may have never envisioned that people would be playing these games though the Internet without installation but that is exactly what you can do today.

JPC is a Java-based x86 emulator that can run some DOS programs on any modern browser with the Java plugin. The JPC site hosts a couple of popular DOS games including DOOM and Mario Brothers but for a more extensive collection, you should check out Classic DOS Games. The sites currently has 169 different games that you can play directly in any web browser that has the Java plugin installed.

JPC based DOS games may not run as fast as their DOSBox counterparts but there’s one advantage – you can try a game online before deciding if you want to download a copy to your hard drive.

Download DOS Games from the Internet

Now that you have everything in place to run DOS games on the computer, you are most definitely looking for some great games to play with.

Here are some popular sites where you can find and download most of your favorite DOS games, but since too many choices can be confusing, check this search engine that will help you search all the popular PC games’ websites from one place.

1. DOS Games – With over 500 classic titles, DOSGames.com is a great place to look for your favorite DOS games. You can run these games using the free DOSBox emulator discussed above. The site is actively updated so it is likely that more games will be added over time.

2. DOS Games Archive – DOS Games Archive is another useful site with a very large collection of DOS games. The sites provides screenshots of the DOS games, user ratings, violence ratings, cheat codes and you can also find out if a particular game is supported on DOSBox. Many of the games listed on the site were commercial games that were later released for free by the game publisher.

3. D-Fend Game Packages – If you chose to install D-Fend Reloaded with DOSBox, then you can easily access hundreds of classic DOS games using this easy installer. Each game package contains a collection of about a dozen or so games of the same category and you can have them all on your machine with a click.

4. Classic DOS Games – This site also contains a wide range of DOS games categorized by their Genre, Company, Year Released, etc. All DOS games listed on this site are freely distributable because they are shareware, freeware, or because the copyright holder has officially and legally released all rights to the public domain.

5. Good Old Games – This site specializes at re-releasing classic commercial games for modern PCs at reasonable prices. Their selection includes many popular DOS-based games that are packaged with DOSBox for a seamless game experience on Windows Vista and XP. If your looking for a commercial game that has not been released as freeware, this may be the best place to look for it.

6. Abandonia – As the title suggests, this site has a very collection of games that are under the category of “abandonware” or titles that are no longer sold /developed by the authors.

7. Home of the Underdogs – One of the most popular abandonware sites with reviews of over 5,300 games for DOS and Windows. Other than game binaries, the sites also offers manuals for a number of games that are no longer commercially available.

For offline reference, you may download this catalog of DOS games from Wikipedia that possibly includes every DOS title that has been released till date.

Let’s assume you have two computers at home and you want to connect them together so that you can easily share an internet connection between the two machines or transfer photos, music and other files from one computer to another. How do you do this?

Connect Two Computers Directly

There are two options – you can either buy a router or, if you are looking for something more simple and don’t want to spend money on new networking hardware, you can connect the two computers using a commonly-available cable. The latter method doesn’t involve any complicated network settings and you will still be able to share files, internet connection, and even printers between computers.

Things you need:
To set up this basic wired home network, all you need is an inexpensive Ethernet crossover cable and the other requirement is that network cards* (also known as LAN or Ethernet cards) should be installed on each of you computers.

This should not be an issue because network cards are available on most newer machines by default but if you are working with a very old computer, you can either attach an internal LAN card to your computer’s motherboard or go for a USB Network adapter that will turn a USB port into an Ethernet (RJ45) port.

An Ethernet crossover cable looks like a standard Ethernet cable but the internal wiring is a little different. You can purchase crossover cables at Amazon.com or from your local computer store. If you have trouble finding them, you can purchase an inexpensive crossover adaptor and that will let you use any standard Ethernet cable as a crossover cable.

Connect Computers with an Ethernet Crossover Cable

Before connecting the two computers with a physical cable, make sure that both machine are using the same workgroup*. Here is step-by-step guide that explains how you can change the workgroup of your computers.
Changing workgroup in Windows XP – From the Start menu, right-click “My Computer.” Select Properties in the drop-down menu, and then select the second tab that says “Computer Name” from the System Properties window. Now click the “Change…” button, enter a unique Workgroup name and reboot your computer.

Changing workgroup in Windows 7 or Vista – Open the Control Panel, type “Workgroup” in the search box, and select the entry that says “Change Workgroup Name.” Click the “Change…” button, enter a Workgroup name and restart the computer. Windows 7 users can skip one step; simply type “Workgroup” in the search box in the start menu, and select the first entry, then proceed as above.

Now that the workgroups are same for both computers, connect the two computers together using the Ethernet crossover cable. Simply plug-in one end of the crossover cable into the network adapter of Computer A and connect the other end of the cable to the network adapter of Computer B.
Windows will automatically recognize the new network, and you can now easily view files and folder that the other computer has shared. Simply open Networks from the Start Menu (or the Control Panel), and you should see the other computer by its name. You can then browse any shared files on the other computer, and can even utilize shared printers.

Troubleshooting – If you do not see the other computer under Networks, you probably have a prompt at the top of your Network window saying that Network discovery is turned off (screenshots below). Select “Turn on Network Discovery and File Sharing.” In the next prompt, select “No, make the network I am connected to a private network.” Now you should see the other computer on the home network.

While it is possible to share files between two computers connected with a crossover cable without making them part of the same workgroup, the method will only work if both computers have this network set as a private network, and may still cause problems. It is therefore advisable to have both computers on the same workgroup before sharing files and printers.

Share an Internet Connection Between Two Computers

There are scenarios where you may want to share the same internet connection between two computers. For instance:

Situation A - You have setup a Wi-Fi network at home but your old desktop computer doesn’t have a wireless network card. In that case, you can use the laptop to connect to the internet wirelessly and then share that same connection with the desktop over a crossover Ethernet cable.

Situation B – You have a netbook with a built-in cellular data connection. You can share that connection with any another computer at home through the crossover Ethernet cable.

Situation C – You use a (slow) Wireless USB modem with your laptop computer while your desktop is connected to an ADSL Broadband line and there’s no router at home. For any bandwidth intensive tasks, like when you want to backup photos from your laptop to an online service, you can connect the laptop to the desktop and things will happen much faster.

OK, let’s look at the steps required for sharing an Internet connection.
First, if you only wish to share internet connection and not files, both computers need not belong to the same workgroup. All you need to do is to connect the two computers with the Ethernet crossover cable, and then turn on Internet connection sharing in the computer that already has an Internet connection. The instructions vary for different versions of Windows:

For Windows XP – Select “Network and Internet Connections” from the Control Panel and click “Network Connections.”

Right-click on the network connection you wish to share (the one connected to the internet), select Properties, click on the “Advanced” tab, and then check the box that says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.” Click OK, and the second computer that you have connected to this computer with the Crossover Cable should have internet access now.

For Windows 7 and Vista – Open Control Panel, enter “network connections” in the search box on the top right and select “View Network Connections.”

Right-click on the network connection you wish to share (this must be the one connected to the internet) and select Properties. Select the "Sharing" tab and then check the option that says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.” Click OK, and the other computer you have connected to this Windows 7 or Vista computer should have internet access now.

What’s the first thing that you do when you are back from a vacation or from a family wedding? You probably connect the digital camera to your computer and transfer the photographs (a better word would be "memories") from the camera to your hard-drive.

You’ve following this routine for quite some time and, as a result, a few hundred thousand photographs reside on your computer now neatly tagged and arranged in folders. But wait, do you have a backup plan for these "priceless" digital photos?

How to Backup your Digital Photos

There are basically four ways by which you can backup your photos at home:

1. Backup your photos on CDs and DVDs – This is a cheap and easy option but please remember that disks have a finite shelf life so pictures that you burn today on to a DVD disk may not be accessible after few years.

2. Use an external hard drive – You can get a portable 500 GB drive for less than $100, they connect to your computer via USB (or Firewire) ports but again, you can’t expect an external hard drive to last forever.

3. Use Network Storage – If you have pictures across multiple computers, you can use a network attached storage (NAS) device like HP’s MediaSmart Home Server* or Apple’s Time Capsule to automatically backup all your digital content in one place.

The HP device can transfer files to Amazon S3 so you have an added layer of protection.

4. Use an online backup services – You can use photo-sharing websites (like Flickr) or an online backup service (like Mozy) to put your photos on to the "cloud" and access them from any other computer.

For most users, the best option for preserving digital photographs is often "online backup" because it doesn’t require you to burn DVDs (which are unreliable anyway), you don’t have to invest in any new hardware and your photos are likely to last forever as long as you pay the yearly bills.

Online Backup for your Digital Photos

There are again four different routes for online backup:

# 1. Online backup services like Mozy that offer unlimited storage and allow not just photographs but files of all types.

# 2. Photo-sharing services like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums that allow you to store both photographs and video clips online.

# 3. File-synchronization services like Dropbox, SugarSync or Windows Live Mesh.

# 4. Online storage services like Amazon S3 or Windows Live SkyDrive.

What should you use?

Well, photo-sharing sites allow you to visually browse pictures in the web browser itself while a backup service like Mozy will first require you to download the photos on to the computer before you can show them to your visiting grand-parents.

File-synchronization services like Live Mesh not only provide online backup but they also save a copy of your digital files (pictures in this case) on to your other computers so even if your main hard-drive suffers a crash, you can quickly retrieve files from the other computers.

The Cost of Online Storage for Digital Photos

If you only have a few hundred photos on your computer that occupy anywhere between 1-2 GB of storage space, you can enjoy any of above backup services for free but if your storage requirements are slightly more, you probably need to for a paid version.

Now here’s a visual graph that compares the storage cost of various online backup services where you can safely store your priceless photos.

Flickr Pro costs around $25 an year and you can store unlimited number of pictures here though the maximum size of individual pictures should not exceed 20 MB (bad for professional photographs who shoot in RAW – see comments).
Picasa Web Albums on the other hand lets you purchase storage on-demand so you only pay $5 per year for 20 GB of online storage but end-up paying $100 for 400 GB of storage. Like Flickr, images uploaded to Picasa Web Albums can be no larger than 20MB and are restricted to 50 megapixels or less.
Live Skydrive is the best online storage service – it offers 25 GB of free space (50 MB limit for individual files) and that should be enough for most home users. You can upload picture libraries from your desktop to Windows Live SkyDrive using the free Windows Live Photo Gallery client though it’s only available for Windows.
Online backup services like Mozy cost around $60 per year respectively but here you get unlimited storage, your files are automatically backed up (in the background) and there are no restrictions on file-size.
SmugMug, another popular photo-sharing site, offers a service called SmugVault that uses Amazon S3 to backup your photos, videos and all other file-types that you can imagine. They have a relaxed 600 MB per file limit and you pay the normal Amazon S3 rent for files that are not photos.
Amazon S3, where you pay only for what you use, is very reliable (their SLA promises 99.9% uptime) turns out to be very expensive if your yearly storage requirement exceeds 10 GB.

Here’s another representation of the same graph – Yearly costs (in $) vs. storage offered (in GB).
Windows Live SkyDrive offers 25 GB of online storage space for your pictures for free though there’s no option to purchase extra storage. In paid services, Google’s Picasa offers the best value for money if your photo collection can fit in 20 GB else a Flickr Pro account probably makes more sense.

Picasa desktop software makes it easy for you to upload and download photos from Picasa Web Albums. Flickr provides an uploading utility but you need to rely on a third-party hacks to download the original (full-resolution) albums from Flickr.

Have you ever deleted a file (or folder) from the desktop and emptied the recycle bin only to realize, seconds later, that you deleted the wrong one? Or have you ever edited a document or photograph, saved the file, and then wanted to undo those changes?

Luckily, both Windows Vista and Windows 7 include a build-in feature called Shadow Copy that can solve this exact problem without you having to do anything. As you work with the files, Shadow Copy will automatically save incremental backups of your files in the background so if you accidently delete or change a file, you can easily revert to the previous version with a simple right-click.

"Restore Previous Versions" for Vista Home

The Shadow Copy feature is available in all Windows 7 editions but only in the Business and Ultimate editions of Vista. However, if your computer is running Vista Home Basic or Home Premium editions, you can still enjoy the Shadow Copy feature without upgrading your OS.

In that case, all you need is Shadow Explorer – a free (and tiny) utility that makes it easy for users of Vista Home Basic and Home Premium edition to view the Shadow Copies of files that Windows is already saving on to their systems.

When you run the Shadow Explorer utility, you are presented with a Windows Explorer like dual-pane view as shown in the screenshot.

From the drop-down menu, you can select how far back in time you wish to restore files (or folders) from. The right pane has a list of all files and folders that were on your computer at that date and time.
You can browse through the folders just like you do on Windows Explorer and if you need to restore the previous version of any file or folder, simply right-click on the file or folder and click “Export.” This will allow you to save the file in the location of your choice so you don’t have to replace the most-recent version.
The feature may also come handy if document get damaged (say due to improper shutdown) or you want to bring back the files that were deleted by some virus.

Shadow Explorer for Windows 7 and Vista

ShadowExplorer will run just fine on all editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7; however, only Windows Vista Starter, Home Basic, and Home Premium users will need this tool as they don’t have any other mechanism to access shadow copies of files that have changed with time.

The Shadow Copy functionality was first added to Windows 2003 so the ShadowExplorer utility will work on that OS as well provided the shadow copy service is enabled. However, ShadowExplorer will not work on any version of Windows XP, 2000, or any earlier version of Windows, as they do not have the shadow copy service that ShadowExplorer relies on

Virtualization tools aren’t just for geeks.

You may use these programs to try out other operating systems on your computer without disturbing the existing setup. Or, if you have upgraded to a newer OS, you can create a virtual machine of your previous OS and use it to run older programs that aren’t supported in your new OS. Or if you want to run multiple versions of the same software (like Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS5), you can install one of them on your main OS and the other inside a virtual machine.

Virtualization Software for Windows

Although desktop virtualization programs have been around for many years, they are more mainstream now than ever before.

In order to run virtualization programs like Windows Virtual PC or VMware Player, your computer needs to have a processor that supports hardware virtualization. Most newer processors already support this but you may also use the free SecurAble utility to determine if your computer processor supports hardware virtualization or not.

If the CPU inside your Windows PC supports virtualization but you are unable to use a Virtualization program, chances are that you need to enable that feature via your BIOS. Microsoft offers an easy guide on how you can turn on virtualization through the BIOS dashboard.

If your computer has an older processor that does not support hardware virtualization, you can still run virtual machines using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 or Virtual Box, as they don’t require it.

Windows Virtual PC and Virtual PC 2007

Windows Virtual PC, that is designed to run previous versions of Windows seamlessly inside Windows 7, has made desktop virtualization even more ubiquitous. Programs installed in the virtual operating system will show up in the host computer’s Start menu, and you can even set them as the default program for handling a particular file type.

Windows Virtual PC can run on all editions of Windows 7, but users of the Home edition will have to create their own virtual machines from an original Windows installation disk or from old Windows installation. In addition to running Windows XP, you can also use a Virtual PC to run Windows Vista, XP, Windows 2000 and even some versions of Linux including Ubuntu, OpenSuse and Red Hat Linux.

Virtual PC offers some unique features like you can store changes on a separate virtual hard drive than the operating system, and there’s support for undo disks so you can roll back changes made to a virtual machine. Windows Virtual PC requires hardware virtualization and won’t run on computers that don’t support this.

The older version of Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, is still available as a free download. Virtual PC 2007 can run on any computer running Windows XP or newer and does not require a processor that supports hardware virtualization. This makes it useful for Windows 7 user who want to use the XP mode but do not have a processor with hardware virtualization.

VMware Player

First released in 2005 as a free solution to run pre-built virtual machines, VMware Player 3.0 is now a complete basic desktop virtualization solution that allows you to create, manage, and run virtual machines.
VMware Player supports 64-bit guest operating systems and you can send print commands to the printer attached to the host OS. VMware offers a Unity mode that lets you run p

rograms from a virtual machine alongside programs running on your main operating system. Yo u can also launch programs in the virtual machine via a program menu that appears above your standard Windows start menu.

VMware requires Windows XP and newer, including 64 bit versions, and you can run Windows 95 and newer, Linux, DOS, BSD, etc. as virtual machines. If you are running VMware Player on Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate, you can import your virtual copy of XP from Windows XP mode and run it directly in VMware Player. Finally, VMware offers a wide range of preconfigured virtual appliances that allow you to test and run programs and operating systems quickly and easily.

Sun VirtualBox

VirtualBox is equally at home on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and supports a wide range of guest operating systems (except Mac OS, which is not licensed for virtualization).

VirtualBox can run a wide variety of virtual machines from other desktop virtualization programs. It will even run the XP mode from Windows 7, allowing you to run XP mode on computers that lack hardware virtualization support. It can capture snapshots of a virtual machine and these are handy if you want to roll back changes later.

Finally, VirtualBox allows you to run a guest OS seamlessly with your host OS through Seamless Mode. This places the guest’s taskbar in your host OS’ desktop, which lets you fully control the guest OS right inside your standard host desktop.

Read more: http://petnol.blogspot.com/2009/12/free-virtualization-software-for-your.html#ixzz0bs9kdQcF
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Have you ever deleted a file (or folder) from the desktop and emptied the recycle bin only to realize, seconds later, that you deleted the wrong one? Or have you ever edited a document or photograph, saved the file, and then wanted to undo those changes?

Luckily, both Windows Vista and Windows 7 include a build-in feature called Shadow Copy that can solve this exact problem without you having to do anything. As you work with the files, Shadow Copy will automatically save incremental backups of your files in the background so if you accidently delete or change a file, you can easily revert to the previous version with a simple right-click.

"Restore Previous Versions" for Vista Home

The Shadow Copy feature is available in all Windows 7 editions but only in the Business and Ultimate editions of Vista. However, if your computer is running Vista Home Basic or Home Premium editions, you can still enjoy the Shadow Copy feature without upgrading your OS.

In that case, all you need is Shadow Explorer – a free (and tiny) utility that makes it easy for users of Vista Home Basic and Home Premium edition to view the Shadow Copies of files that Windows is already saving on to their systems.

When you run the Shadow Explorer utility, you are presented with a Windows Explorer like dual-pane view as shown in the screenshot.

From the drop-down menu, you can select how far back in time you wish to restore files (or folders) from. The right pane has a list of all files and folders that were on your computer at that date and time.
You can browse through the folders just like you do on Windows Explorer and if you need to restore the previous version of any file or folder, simply right-click on the file or folder and click “Export.” This will allow you to save the file in the location of your choice so you don’t have to replace the most-recent version.
The feature may also come handy if document get damaged (say due to improper shutdown) or you want to bring back the files that were deleted by some virus.

Shadow Explorer for Windows 7 and Vista

ShadowExplorer will run just fine on all editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7; however, only Windows Vista Starter, Home Basic, and Home Premium users will need this tool as they don’t have any other mechanism to access shadow copies of files that have changed with time.

The Shadow Copy functionality was first added to Windows 2003 so the ShadowExplorer utility will work on that OS as well provided the shadow copy service is enabled. However, ShadowExplorer will not work on any version of Windows XP, 2000, or any earlier version of Windows, as they do not have the shadow copy service that ShadowExplorer relies on.

Read more: http://petnol.blogspot.com/2009/12/undelete-files-folders-in-windows-vista.html#ixzz0bs1pp5QO
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution