I wanted to share a tip that just saved one of my users a lot of time. We use PDM Pro and the user has been saving a file all day, but hasn't checked it in. On his last save something went wrong and the file was saved with a 0kb size. If we didn't use PDM and just a network drive I could have recovered from an hourly server backup. Since it was only being saved locally he was pretty screwed.

Luckily I've turned on Windows "Backup using File History". I chose to only backup "C:\Vault" and set it to run every 10 minutes and to keep backups for one month. I have it backup to an old NAS since the client PC's don't have spare drives and I don't want to risk a hard drive failure. I was able to drill down into this backup directory and recover the users file and save him hours of work. I will now look at setting this up in group policy for all PDM users.

Another option is to encourage users to check in files, but keep checked out. This is automatic though and doesn't require thinking.

I hope this can help someone else. This isn't the first time a backup of the vault has been helpful.