I had a user's laptop stolen recently during shipping and it was setup with windows live sync. The thief or buyer's kids took some photos of themselves and they were synced to the user's my documents. I had just finished moving the users files out of the synced my documents folder when I noticed this. Later they took some more photos and a video. I wrote up a batch script to copy files out synced directory every 5 minutes into a dated directory. In the end I ended up with a lot of copies of the same few files.

Ignoring what windows livesync offers (at the time there was no way to undelete files - I've moved onto dropbox so this ins't really an issue for me) what's the best way to preserve changes and files from a directory? I'm interested in windows solutions but if you know of a good way on a *nix please go ahead and share.