Restoring vista

Popular wisdom can be frightening. Past errors? Normally unrecoverable, better learn to live with their consequences. Second chances in the future? Rare, don’t count on them. Present predicament? Uncertain at best, so grin and bear it. In the long run, time is an entropic roller coaster where some local ups inevitably tend to an overall down and a halt. This is life at its nakedest. Blackish as the picture might be, it has a pinch of serenity in it. Pessimists can only be pleasantly astonished, never bitterly disappointed.

It is with this wisdom that we used to approach Microsoft products and especially Windows. Install some unusual program, press the wrong series of keys, or double-click too nervously on some buttons and down you went with your computer crashing. And if you screwed-up your operating system you knew that it was like a sour marriage: dead was the past idyll, you could only hope to divorce and restart from scratch. Cut your losses, unplug, press the off button, format the hard disk, get a new life. Some times, it was not too late. Many users thought all this exceedingly annoying, even preposterous. But it had that taste of real life in it which no digital hype could hide: irreversibility. You, your hardware and your software shared the same wagon. The machine was as embedded in time as its user. And as with your car or relations, fixing was something you did by moving forward, the only direction allowed.

Something then changed. System Restore was introduced in Windows XP. Now, you could roll back the system files and the registry to those from a previous date, when the system was known to work properly, without losing any personal file (say documents or e-mail messages). Magic. So, these days, is your computer actually unhinged from time? Not quite.

The truth is that your software lives in parallel universes. Shadow paths are created whenever there is a significant system event. Made a mistake? Simply switch to another possible world where that mistake has not occurred. Nothing terribly new then, technologically: it’s just that now we have some many tons of Gigabytes in our hard-disks that we can keep piling up possible worlds as we like. Irreversibility is achieved in terms of never-closed, always–available, alternative tracks. It is not time travelling, it is the power of memory, but who cares? The outcome is indistinguishable.

The new MS Vista makes restoring even easier and more powerful “In Windows Vista, System Restore allows recovery from a greater range of changes than in Windows XP. The file filter system for system restore used in previous versions of Windows is replaced with a new approach: Now, when a restore point is requested, a shadow copy of a file or folder is created. A shadow copy is essentially a previous version of the file or folder at a specific point. Windows Vista can request restore points automatically, or do so when you ask. When the system needs to be restored, files and settings are copied from the shadow copy to the live volume used by Windows Vista. This improves integration with other aspects of backup and recovery and makes System Restore even more usable.”

How tempting. With the opportunity of jumping to another possible world at no cost, whenever something goes wrong, are we going to be more irresponsible? Imagine a Life Restore button. Would you be more reckless? Or would you learn from past mistakes and get things right?

One thing seems predictable. One can easily imagine System Restore repeat the same file restore procedure again and again, like a broken (vinyl) record. You will be trying to leave that possible world, but System Restore will push you back there after every reboot. You will be trapped in some digital Punxsutawney, like Phil (Bill Murray) in Groundhog Day. Catchy name for the next Vista virus?