Versioning tracks changes to a file over time, allowing users to roll back to a previous state without maintaining full separate copies. It is a distinct concept from backup and works alongside it to protect against data loss.
Versioning
Another thing that can really help us out is something called versioning. That is, as we start saving different copies of something, being able to go back to a prior version.
Versioning is probably something that you have access to already. If you're using Google Drive and Google Docs, or perhaps you're using Office 365, a lot of that already does a form of versioning. What's happening is, as you make changes to the document, it's saving those changes in different versions. Perhaps maybe you accidentally deleted something. What versioning allows you to do is go back to a prior copy of it, so that way you can go back and retrieve that information.
Versioning is not backup. With backup we create a copy of something, so it's a whole other copy of it. What happens with versioning is that rather than creating a whole other copy for every single version, it's just tracking the changes. So your changes get tracked over time, and if you ever go back to a prior version, it would just be those changes.
If anything became corrupt with the original, then you would lose the document, and so we'd still want — even if we're doing versioning — we'd still want a backup copy that's set aside on a separate backup source, so that if there is any corruption that happens, we can still do a restore of the document.
It's beyond the scope of this course to get into volume shadow copy, however I did want to show you where you could find versioning on your machine. Here I'm on my Windows machine, and I can right-click one of these drives and go to properties and the previous versions tab. The previous versions tab gives us a hint to what previous versions looks like. I don't have anything set up right now, because once again, that's not what we're trying to do. I just want to show you an example of where we could actually do some restoring of files, and this is the window that would allow us to do that.
Here's another example. I'm on Google Docs, and I'm going to go to file and say version history, and I'm going to see version history. I just created this document, but you can see that it's starting to track the changes with this.
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