There's some interesting discussion and commentary going on over at Ed Bott's blog about the way a feature has been implemented in different editions of Vista but not exposed to the user consistently in every edition. That feature is the Previous Versions feature, which is tied to the Shadow Copy and System Restore functions. In Vista Home Basic, the user interface for restoring shadow copies of a given file is not available. There's a few ways to get around that, like moving your data to another drive (what if you don't have one, though?), but there's another solution that seems likely: have some enterprising third-party programmer write an application, or even a script, that gives you access to shadow copies of files in Vista Home.
I'm with Ed on the notion that backup in Vista needs to be something everyone can use effectively, not just the folks who shelled out for the top-end edition of the program. And even those of us who did have to deal with some terribly ornery restrictions, which makes me that much more grateful that the classic (what a word) NTBACKUP tool is still available.
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