Windows Vista just hosed my work

17th December 2007

Up ’till now I’ve been vary happy with Windows Vista. I think it’s a lot better than XP. When I got my latest laptop I considered returning to the Apple fold but couldn’t get the same power to weight ratio in a Mac laptop so I stuck with a PC. Then, today, Vista deleted three days of work. Fortunately I was able to recover it but it wasn’t a pretty experience.

It all started with a Windows security update last Thursday. The security update was actually six separate security updates released simultaneously. Since installing the updates, Flash has crashed three times (it never crashed before this), Photoshop has crashed once (ditto) and then today Windows decided that my anti-virus and anti-spyware (Windows Defender – the default Microsoft product) didn’t exist, which prompted it to throw security alerts every time I tried to do anything.

The solution was obvious – revert the system to a state before the update. Fortunately, Microsoft’s system restore makes this easy – it restores the system to an earlier point without affecting your user files. I reverted the system and all seemed fine. In particular, my anti-virus and anti-spyware worked once more.

So I launched Eclipse and started work again, only to discover all my work had also reverted to the state it was in last Thursday. That’s three days work down the tubes. System restore is only supposed to affect system files, not my personal files.

Fortunately, I use Subversion to manage my code so I was able to restore the latest version from the Subversion repository. It also seems that this problem only happens with Subversion – all my work that wasn’t in the repository remained at the latest version. Apparently Vista thinks that Subversion repositories are system files that should be backed up and restored at the system restore points. Beware. If using Subversion, check in your code before doing a system restore.

Tags: Subversion, Windows