Sun shows Microsoft how it’s done

Frankly, it was embarrassing. There I was, flipping through the “what’s new” pages for Sun’s OpenSolaris 2008.11 release, when suddenly I stumble across this bit about Time Slider.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the feature, Time Slider is a UI extension to the Gnome shell that allows you to easily configure and access the file system “snapshot” features of ZFS. Employing a simple sliding timescale metaphor, Time Slider lets you go back in time by sliding this little shell window control toolbar thingy from right to left. As you do so, Time Slider pulls snapshot differential data from the ZFS volume and superimposes it over the current folder and file view, making it possible to drag and drop older versions of a file or folder from the past (the Time Slider manipulated folder) to the present (any other shell folder).

It looks slick, though I’ve yet to try it firsthand (I’m downloading the ISO as a write this). Combined with an easily accessible control panel — for configuring which folders to monitor/expose and also how much storage to dedicate to ZFS snapshot data — Time Slider should make it trivially easy to leverage a very powerful feature of this up-and-coming file system.

You can learn more about Time Slider by visiting Erwann Chenede’s blog; however, the real question for me is: Why on Earth didn’t Microsoft implement something similar for Previous Versions under Windows Vista?

If you search far enough back in my blog archive, you’ll discover that I’ve been a big fan of Previous Versions (a.k.a. Volume Snapshots) since Vista first arrived. In fact, I argued that Apple’s much ballyhooed Time Machine was a joke compared to Volume Snapshots — a cheap, file-based knock-off that required dedicated storage and came with a hokey “Star Trek”-like interface. Heck, they even stole the name (Previous Versions went by the code name Time Warp long before Apple began bootlegging Windows Longhorn features en masse).

But in a classic example of form winning out over function, Time Machine got the lion’s share of attention, while Previous Versions wallowed in obscurity, hidden within the bowels of the File/Folder Properties dialog box. Never mind that Microsoft’s implementation was technically superior (block-level differentials vs. full file copies), or that it worked with locally stored data (i.e., you can right-click on almost any file or folder and select “Restore Previous Version” from the context menu), or that it integrated seamlessly with the admittedly anemic Windows File Backup utility (e.g., archival data appears as yet another Previous Version of the file/folder). Microsoft did such poor job of articulating the feature that, to this day, many Vista users have no idea it’s even there.

Now along comes Sun with yet another take on exposing snapshot data — a metaphor that, quite frankly, puts Vista’s hide-and-seek approach to shame. Worse still, Time Slider is open source, which means some guy cobbled this thing together in his spare time. And just how many highly paid professional developers were involved in Microsoft’s pathetic effort?

Maybe the company will get it right with Windows 7. The dev team has already corrected one of the more glaring flaws in Vista’s file backup utility: the inability to specify folders or files that should always be backed up. And since much of the team’s focus to date has been on UI fluff, perhaps it’ll wake-up and realize what a powerful “new” selling point this could be for Vista’s successor.

After all, it has a working example in Time Slider. And we all know that, when it comes to ripping off good ideas, Microsoft is an attentive understudy to its Apple masters.