[grey-area]

You see a huge amount of this sort of poor-man's version control in other industries - everyone I have worked with in other industries has worked out some personal scheme of versioning using initials, dates, numbering in order to sequence the various states of their work as it passes through multiple people and multiple versions.

A lot of room for disruption there I think if someone works out how to make version control fit better with ordinary people's view of the world (i.e. not git, svn etc). Versions in word are the closest I've seen to it but it really shouldn't be in one specific program but in the OS or a helper program.

[ygra]

File History in Windows 8 is nice, sort of. It takes snapshots of changed files every hour. Sadly you have to enable it first and it's sort-of treated as a backup (so you have to store the copies on a different volume, etc.). So, not exactly what people have in their home unless they know about such things.

[grey-area]

I think the missing solution here though is collaboration and versioning between people, rather than individual backups.

Things like File History and Time Machine are nice, but don't really address this need.