Accidentally deleted an important word document? Office crashed and your presentation was damaged? If you got Vista, you can restore any file within minutes thanks to Vista previous versions feature.

Vista automatically creates previous versions of your files without having to create a backup of them manually. Previous versions are basically backup copies of files and folders that Vista automatically saves as part of its system restore procedure. These backup files are typically created once a day. The mandatory service for this feature is Volume Shadow Copy should be running.

To access the previous versions of a file, right-click the file or folder, and click “Restore previous versions”. You’ll see a list of available backup copies. To restore a previous backup, just select the version you want to restore and click the Restore button.

The Vista Previous Versions feature also lets you restore deleted files. To restore a file that was deleted, open the folder that contained the file and right-click somewhere in the folder – don’t select any file – and then click Restore Previous Versions. From the list, select the file you want to restore and drag it from the folder to another location where you want to save it.

This feature is not available for Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium. Actually, the feature does exist, but users can’t access the backups of their files and date. The feature is automatically enabled by default in other Vista versions.