A simple way to view Shadow Copies on Windows 8.1 without installing or downloading software
Upon pressing "undo" accidentally in File Explorer on my Surface Pro 3, Windows 8.1 performs bad behaviour. See details and frustration others have had here: answers.microsoft.com thread It seems Windows 8.1 made all the contents of the folder disappear as a consequence of undoing a previous rename of the folder from "New Folder". That is, the file entry in the Master File Table was lost. Hopefully the entries were deleted and the space is reusable (I'm not sure what how Windows manipulates the MFT in this case). So, I wanted to recover the files from that folder. I first found out that Windows 8 has two kinds of "backup" systems, one called File History that is intended to make regular replicas of the tracked Libraries to a separate physical disk or to a network share. Since this File History wasn't configured and not turned on by default on my SP3, I looked toward Volume Shadow Copy, which appears to be enabled by default on the C: drive