Windows Vista come with a wonderful feature called "Previous Versions" that does a periodic backup of all your files. For as long as I've used Windows Vista, I never managed to get "Previous Versions" to work. Now, before I start, one of the first few things after I installed Windows (98, XP, Vista, whatever) is to optimise them. One of the many ways to optimise a Windows is to turn off services that I thought unnecessary, and this case is one of example when I turned off services that was necessary for certain feature to work, but which I thought unnecessary. To figure it out, I read lots of forums, I even emailed some representatives from Microsoft to no avail. Finally, today I really put myself into the mood to solve this issue. After much trial and error, restarting my machine countless times, I finally found out two things.

First, it needs Server service to display Previous Versions UI, go figure. Server service supports file, print, and named-pipe sharing over the network for this computer. When I read that, I thought "I don't need any sharing as I'm at home. Fine, I can turn that off." Wrong. With Server service turned off, this is what you'll get when you navigate to Previous Versions tab.


Fine, after I figured that out, I turned on Server service, I got the UI working now, but still it said that there are no previous versions available. This can't be right.


I modified Documents folder virtually every single day, so there has to be backups. As it turns out, in order to be able to find Previous Versions backup, Vista needs TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service. This service description says "Provides support for the NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NetBT) service and NetBIOS name resolution for clients on the network, therefore enabling users to share files, print, and log on to the network" I don't use sharing, I don't use NetBIOS. Fine, I'll turned it off. It was one of the many services that I thought unnecessary, thus turned off. Unknowingly to me, this is the services that allows Previous Versions backups to be found.


When I turned on TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service, immediately my backups are there. Gosh !! What does sharing and network level service has to do with backups? Anyway, managed to resolve it, and now I could see that I have TONS of backups of my files, some as old as September 2007, which is good to know.

Browsing old copies of files is easy. Click on the date that you want, and Open it.

There, you'll see all your files as it was on that day. Now, Mac fans will say that the feature is there in Leopard in the form of Time Machine. Yeah, it's the same concept. And don't start on who-copy-who, shall we?

If you happen to own Windows Vista Business or Ultimate on your machine, Previous Versions feature should have been enabled by default. It's a priceless feature, one that you think you'll never need but you'll be grateful it's there when you accidentally deleted or replaced important files in your machine, or when virus strikes. Of course, as the backups are local, it doesn't help in the event of disaster or hard-drive crash. To do that, I highly recommend you get an external hard drive, which are cheap now.

I almost bought this in an instance when I saw this. Unfortunately, when I clicked to buy, the price was $1099 with no discount.

Reached home today, turned on my PC, and Windows Update notified me that there's Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) ready for download, together with at least other ten security-related fixes. If you happen to use Office 2007, go and get the SP1 now.


Windows Update installing Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1

One of the cool thing about N95 is its GPS ability. Couple that with mapping application like Nokia Maps or Google Maps, it's a killer. You know how far you are from your destination, you can roughly know where to alight from the bus, since you know your destination and you know exactly where you are. You don't need to be afraid of getting lost (maybe not in Singapore, but certainly you can in Jakarta). Last month, as I played a lot with Google Maps, unknowingly my data charges shot up. I used about 9 MB of data, for about S$27. That's very expensive. I repeat, very. Come to the rescue is Nokia Map Loader. It's an application, clearly from Nokia, to load selected maps around the world to my N95 phone, so I'll have the maps ready in the phone without having to connect to Internet to download the maps. Cool stuff. I have loaded the map of Indonesia (I think only Jakarta is available), whole of Singapore, and Malaysia.


Nokia Map Loader

I was quite surprised, when I search for road names in Jakarta, the result appeared. The map of Jakarta is complex enough, but the 5.2MB download includes all the road names, complete with postal codes. I'm impressed.

After blogdrive went offline briefly yesterday due to domain expiration, blogdrive users can now rejoice after the service is back online. So far, there hasn't been any explanation from blogdrive on what happened yesterday. For me, I quickly logged back in, and backed up all my posts there. I have about one year worth of blog posts there from April 2004 to May 2005. I'm sure LOTS of blogdrive users will start running away now. If you happen to wanting to move from Blogdrive to Wordpress, this post may help.

I'm not sure if anyone of you using blogdrive.com for your blogging platform, but I was a former user of blogdrive.com, and somehow today the domain name has expired, and all <name>.blogdrive.com blogs are gone. A couple of people has already noticed this issue and has asked questions, trying to find answers to their missing blog.

Few months back, Sony announced their online photo sharing site, Imagestation, will be closed. That came as a big blow to me, as I have backed up all my photos since 1999 with them, over 25,000 photos at over 33 GB. All my photos during my university days and working days until now are all there. All my families photos and all those travels are all there. I have used it as my second backup. I have a full set in my main hard drive, and another set in my external hard disk. If there is anything that I cannot lose from my PC, this is it. I can lose installer files, some documents, it's fine, but not my family and my photo collections, they are irreplaceable. I'm sure you agree with me on this.


My current "My Pictures" folder size

Warning: Tech talk below, but if you are interested how to backup your ever-increasing photo collections online, read on.

Imagestation announced they'll move all my photos to another site, Shutterfly, for free. That's cool, I thought in the first place, until I found out that I couldn't access my original-sized photos in Shutterfly. I contacted their customer service, and they said that they don't provide original-sized photos because of technical reason. What??!! When I upload a full 5MP photo into Shutterfly, you tell me 640x480 photo is the only one I'll ever get? C'mon, be serious. Yeah, they are serious, they don't provide it. Sad.

And, here I am, looking for a new host for all my photos, and I'm ready to pay for it. I know no free site will host my 30GB photos for free, none. I've done some researched over the past one week. PicasaWeb looks good and easy, Flickr is popular though un-organized, but my choice in the end came to either Fotki or Smugmug. Picasa came with free 1GB storage, and it's $20/year for 10GB or $75/year for 40GB. That's expensive, and very limited compared to the rest of the competitors. Flickr, on the other hand, offer $24.95/year for the pro account, for unlimited storage, but it's messy. The only way you can organize your photos is by sets and tags, and that's messy to me.

Come Fotki and Smugmug, two very well known photo sharing site. Fotki currently offers $30/year for unlimited storage for its Premium account. What drives me to Fotki is its ability to allow FTP access. With FTP access, it'll be so easy to upload your photos, and to download them in the future should I need it. It allows you to create folders, subfolders, sub-subfolders, and so on, to organize your albums of photos. That's much better than Flickr's. I can easily organize by year, by month, by events, etc. Next competitor is Smugmug, I am currently on their 14-days free trial of Standard accounts. I still have 10 days left to try out their services. A standard account costs $40, the most expensive of all (not considering PicasaWeb), but its features and potential beats the rest. Firstly, it provides an open API, basically an open programming language, so anyone can write any utilities, applications to interface with Smugmug. The result are impressive, there are a number of free applications out there that allow you to upload, download, and do many things with your Smugmug account. ACDSee, which I use, offers Smugmug plugin with their latest ACDSee 10 Photo Manager. Secondly, it allows better organization like Fotki, albeit only two levels, but that's enough. You can have keywords as you would expect, but you can create ShareGroups, which can turn out to be useful.

For example, the way I categorize my albums is by years and months. Subsequently, I can create ShareGroups that is called "Church", and pick all the photo galleries across those years and months that has church outings and activities, and I can share that link with my church friends. That way, they'll see only photos that matter to them, not every single activities of my life in 2007, for example. If there isn't any major issue I find with Smugmug, I'll likely sign up for their service before my trial expires.

Anyway, if you happen to like to sign up for a Smugmug account yourself, you can use my referral code and enter it, when you sign up, into Smugmug voucher coupon code: C26cqbAfqMjWs. I'll earn $10 for my next year's subscription, and you'll earn $5 yourself, paying $35 instead of $40. Definitely not much, but it's a win-win really. Do you use any online photo sharing/backup site? Where do you keep them?