Your paragraph about Windows 8 is actually kind of wrong. Windows 8 does have a “File History” feature found under Control Panel\System and Security\File History.

Here’s what it looks like: http://imgur.com/a/WYq15

i’m a programmer and i get paid for my work. I make some personal stuff for me, because i like to code, and i use it in my guruplug or where ever i want.

I think you shouldn’t put your programs that a business paid for them in strange servers that you don’t belong to you. Those servers are owned by other business and you never get sure about the use of all that information you upload.

If you are a IT guy you are supposed to know how to backup the programs paid with business money, but please dont use the cloud. Use your own servers, hard disks,..

In the other hand i have my personal stuff, that i like to share, in several ways (blogs, pastebin, github…) and then i can use the cloud.

I use Windows Home Server (V1) to create daily incremental backups both at the office and at home. I also use Live Mesh to sync to 3 different computers. I’d like something with a bit more regular timing, but at least this way I have both incremental backups and multiple location backups. It doesn’t help me if I delete a file the same day I create it, or if I want to go back to an hour earlier, but it has saved me more than once.

I’m really curious about AeroFS listed above. It looks like it’s nicely cross platform. All too often a cross platform program is written for [insert OS] first, and the instructions for other OS’s are rather complicated (try explaining to a normal user what IIS and PHP are, let alone how to install them and their associated components). I’ve put in for an invite, and will share my experience once I get it. Frankly, it may finally make it so I can leave behind my Windows only architecture. I’ve been so addicted to Live Mesh for years that any time I tried to switch, the inability to easily sync between Windows and Linux has held me back.

I would actually be fine with using Git, as there are enough simple installations available on all platforms, and I could share scripts to automate the process. But I have an issue with using a diff based solution for binary files (word docs and accounting databases), and purging old commits to save space would be harder to automate.

mercurial, for sure.

Crashplan also works in Linux and can even be made to work on GUI-less servers…

Windows has its own thing too, call “Shadow Copy”, since Vista. It’s about as useful as Time Machine, but not as glossy and user-friendly. Thus, not many people are aware of it.

You can also check out AeroFS, who claims to be some sort of Dropbox clone, but for a local LAN setting. It’s in beta right now, so will need to request for an invite.

I’ll give another vote for Crashplan. My personal stuff doesn’t really need a formal versioning system beyond what Crashplan offers and their restore functionality is really solid, quick and easy to use. It’s a paid service, but for what you get it’s really good value.

Personally I use git for my projects and also for the /etc/ directory (commits triggered by a cron script) of my machines.

Anyway my father’s Windows machine has the home folder synced and versioned by my own owncloud server. He doesn’t even know about the details, but he knows he can call me to retrieve the original version of that excel file that he has modified several times.

@ AP²:

Nice! I did not know that about Crashplan. This doesn’t help much with stuff that can’t be hosted on 3rd party servers for legal/privacy/nda reasons but useful when recommending personal backup strategies to people.

@ Gui13:

Thanks, but fossil looks much like a traditional version control product. Granted, I only scanned through their front page and docs, but the workflow seems fairly similar to what you would do with SVN or Git. Does it have “automagical versioning for lusers” mode?

@ Eric Daum:

Yes, Word does have this (I don’t think Excel does) in but it is a very flawed implementation. Essentially what happens is that Word keeps the old revisions in the same file. So each time you hit the save button, Word appends some sort of proprietary binary diff to the file. Now if you combine this with the way regular user work with Word documents this has a way of getting out of proportion. I have seen a 3 page Word document that over the span of several months grew to about 160MB. It was more or less a form letter and people were using “the latest version” as a template for the next thing they needed to send out and it kept ballooning out in size till I disabled the versioning.

I was always under the impression that there was something like that built into most Office Software. I have never needed it so I can’t even begin to tell you where to find it.