History Explorer is a program that lets you overview and access old versions of files.Comments on:

By: sawrub

sawrub — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:08:48 +0000

Idiots. This tool is for developers/designers. For whom, the option of being able to revert to a previous version of the file, when something goes terribly wrong is a life saver. Its called version control. And this thing works locally. There is no additional ‘privacy beach’ prospects, other than the ones that exist at all times for a stand alone pc (if any).

Read the description of the software again, and try and understand what it means. Its got nothing to do with ‘deleting your history’, like you do with Internet explorer or Windows > Recent documents.
jeez!

By: Christian

Christian — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:09:27 +0000

I tried the program and it does what it says on the tin, the idea is implemented straight-forwardly and I can easily see the uses for it. Reading through the reviews I can see that many agree. Thus, to those who write it off, just because they cannot understand the point of it: A monkey cannot see the use of a computer either. That does not make the computer useless…

Thanks GAOTD and Exendo!

By: Inflecto (Software Developers)

Inflecto (Software Developers) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:46:40 +0000

There are many other solutions out there to problems like this including utilising Volume Shadow Copy Service on Windows Server 2003 upwards and Windows Vista upwards where if enabled the previos versions of a file can be seen by clickinging properties and then the “Previus Versions” tab.

By: The Stinky Hindu

The Stinky Hindu — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:11:46 +0000

Why do all you noobs just assume you know everything and give a rating based on such, a total guess. Don’t bother wasting yours and our time with negative comments that are not based on facts and without trying the software to begin with. David, how else would you back a file up? You backup your whole hard drive, that takes up a lot of space some where or another, be it other media or another location on the pc. This makes it instantly bad? Do you have a better idea? Obviously not, this program does work great and for people that need files stored safely and able to go back to a previous save will find this a life saver at one point or the other. Agent 001, a privacy breach huh? You have no clue. I erase my history every hour, uhhuh… Your the top noob here as I guarantee you, you don’t even know how to properly erase every track on your machine. If you even did this every hour, properly so it could never be recovered, you’d be spending most of that time shredding everything. Your all ungrateful as well, the developer is giving you FREE software here and you all bitch and complain about false findings, very rare do I see someone here that actually gives a nonbiased statement with true facts and not just a wild guess at what they know in noobworld.

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:56:41 +0000

#96 I noticed the slow down too. I don’t like it one bit… I found that it was taking 60 mgs of memory within the first hour of running, and with outlook (mine is around 30mb) and firefox, which given a large number of tabs can reach ~90mb until I minimize it, it isn’t a program I need quite as much and can’t let it fight with other processes for resources like that.

It seems like a good program, but if it grows like normal databases, and actually reaches the 2 – 7 hundreds of mbs that even sql express can get to, you would need to be running a server to manage under its load.

By: Stewart Wallace

Stewart Wallace — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:04:32 +0000

Couldn’t really evaluate as it didn’t “agree” with my system – XP Home. Everything slowed down, so much so it was hard to tell whether it was a freeze or just so slow. Uninstalled and everything back to as normal as Windows can be. Most noticeable when using IE.

By: Sandra

Sandra — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:58:49 +0000

Arrrrgh! I was so happy with this download for the brief time I was able to try it out, then I went looking for a new WordPress theme for my dieting blog and … ::sniffle:: the virtumonde virus grabbed my computer *again*. I had not yet got a backup, since it was only about an hour after I had downloaded History Explorer, so I lost History Explorer. ::sniffle:: so sad. Will be watching for it to be a GAOTD program again and will definitely give it another test run if it is.

Thanks again, it was a great program from the little I got to check out of it.

By: Glen

Glen — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 08:40:17 +0000

Good useful program for some. Agree with comment 11 + “relocating the database for one, and certainly a tree view for the folders.” Working well and will be helpful.
Thanks Peter and GAOTD

By: TK

TK — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 08:32:26 +0000

For those concerned about the database format it is apparently SQL lite version 3.

16th Jan giveaway has coments section closed, GOATD team care to blog about why?

By: harpo2448

harpo2448 — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:43:33 +0000

(yet another observation)

As previously stated, I saw that after restarting my XP MCE machine the History Explorer Service is running in the background.

But for some reason, after repeating the same procedure on an XP Home machine (installing via Admin account, activating, choosing additional file/folders, etc.) and then restarting the machine, I saw that the service was NOT running in the background.

After several more attempts (turning off Spybot, AVG, etc.) I finally tried installing/activating in “Safe Mode” and then the service was running upon normal boot on the XP Home machine.

—————-

Installation on a Windows ME machine did not work for me.

First, the installation would “hang” right at the beginning (before the “Welcome…Wizard” page could proceed), apparently due to a sub-process of the SETUP.EXE process issuing a “net.exe stop History Explorer Service” instruction. After “closing” that sub-process (using TaskInfo from iarsn.com) the installation would proceed further.

Next it determined (correctly) that .NET Framework 2.0 was not installed, and offered to install it. However, I aborted it because as the download was proceed it appeared from the messed-up titles that I was getting a localized (possibly Chinese?) version. So I aborted the installation and went directly to Microsoft to download the appropriate one and installed that.

Then I proceeded to repeat the launching of the SETUP.EXE installer again (and once again closing the “net.exe stop” sub-process) and it progressed until the end when it again “hanged” on a similar sub-process step, “net.exe start History Explorer Service”. Closing that sub-process allowed the installer to finish. Apparently there was no existing net.exe process/service to stop/start, and it did not know what to do about it.

I next did the GAOTD “activate” then ran the program. I immediately got a pop-up window that said “HISTORY EXPLORER.EXE – Application Error” “Application has generated an exception that could not be handled” “Process ID=0xffc6477b (-3782789), Thread ID=0xffc6ecbf (-3740481)” “Click OK to terminate the application” “Click CANCEL to debug the application”.

After restarting the ME machine and trying to run History Explorer again I got a similar error message (same text, only the numbers were different).

I tried manually running ‘C:\WINDOWS\net.exe start “History Explorer Service”‘ but kept getting a DOS box titled “Finished – net” with the following message “Error 2185: The service name is invalid. Make sure you are specifying a valid service name, and then try again.” I tried with several variations, “History_Explorer_Service” “H_E_Serv” etc., but none worked.

Manually launching the file “C:\Program Files\History Explorer\HistoryExplorer.Service.exe” results in a message window titled “Windows Service Error” “Operating system does not support a Windows service. A service can only be run on Windows NT, Windows 2000, or later.” “OK”. (As I suspected.)

I uninstalled it. It does not seem quite ready for my “advanced” Windows ME system despite the claim it should work, too bad… ;-)

——————-

Perhaps there should be a bit more instruction detail on “how it works”, “what to expect when installing”, and “what to try if your encounter problems” (restarting between certain steps, installing in Safe Mode, etc.).

Hope this helps your debugging efforts. Otherwise, thanks for a neat XP product (finally)!