Consistent with that being the start of the journaling, I found that it had snapshots of files I'd changed going back to my installation of Win7 but not of files that were older.
NTFS is a journaling file system, meaning it's one that can track changes in files. Here's what it showed for me on a source file I've been working on recently but for which I had never requested any automatic backup. You'll get a popup that may say 'There are no previous versions available' but if you're lucky, it'll start out reporting that it's searching (for possibly many seconds) for previous versions and then list the ones it's saved. Right-click on the file and select 'Restore previous versions'.
You can use previous versions to restore files and folders that you accidentally modified or deleted, or that were damaged. Previous versions are either copies of files and folders created by Windows Backup or copies of files and folders that Windows automatically saves as part of a restore point. If you are using Windows 7+ perhaps try the in-built Previous Versions feature it's intended for use in this situation.
