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Microsoft is continually adding new features to Windows, but the recent announcement of a tool called Recall has raised a few eyebrows: It's designed to work like browsing history does in your web browser, but for everything on your PC. Whenever you need to retrace your steps on the Windows desktop or get back to something you were doing before, Recall will help.
Whether you need to see an email you half-remember drafting last week, or want to get back to a photo edit from the previous month, Recall can navigate backwards in time to that specific task. You can think of it like a supercharged version of Windows search: one that doesn't just search through your system in its current state, but also in previous states too.
The problem, as privacy advocates have been quick to point out, is that in order to work, Recall requires everything you do on your PC to be recorded. Microsoft says you can exclude specific apps and websites from the tool (and turn off Recall altogether), and that everything that's recorded is kept locally on your computer. Still, Recall is attracting plenty of pushback from users who would rather not have their activities logged at all.
Right now, the feature is available as a preview release on certain Windows PCs, and it's not clear when it might become available to everyone. You don't have to wait for it though: There are already tools on Windows and macOS that do a very similar job, and we've outlined how they work below.
Microsoft Recall Explained
Recall works through the use of regularly taken snapshots, which are essentially screenshots. (Recall doesn't record continuous video or audio from your system.) The text and images within these screenshots are analyzed and made searchable, which means you can type specific things you want to find in Recall. The tool also lets you scroll back manually through your history on Windows.
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In the words of Microsoft: "Just describe how you remember it and Recall will retrieve the moment you saw it. Any photo, link, or message can be a fresh point to continue from." The idea is you can use natural language queries as much as possible, so even if you only remember scant details about something, you might be able to get back to it.
While Microsoft promises all this recording and analysis is for your own use only, and the feature is completely optional, it has got plenty of people worried. The idea of having everything recorded and stored on your Windows machine, perhaps including a few bank statements and passwords along the way, has raised alarm bells.
Recall is still very much in development, and presumably more robust privacy controls will be introduced as time goes on. (Private browsing windows are already excluded from Recall.) Ultimately, if it proves useful enough, and the potential privacy risks can be minimized, then it could become a part of the Windows experience that we all get accustomed to.
As we've said, right now the feature is only available in preview—for new Windows 11 PCs marked as Copilot+ compatible (essentially, PCs with enough dedicated AI power in the hardware spec). If you like the sound of the tool, but would rather not rely on Microsoft to run your screen recording app or to manage your screen recordings—or if you don’t want to potentially have to upgrade your computer to run Recall—then you do have alternatives.
Windrecorder for Windows
You can head to Github to find the instructions for downloading and installing Windrecorder for Windows, a "memory search app" that's free to use. Note there are several stages to the installation process: Follow the step-by-step guide to get all of the necessary software components set up.
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When everything is up and running, you'll find Windrecorder in the system tray or notification center, down in the bottom right corner of the screen. Right-click on its icon (two purple arrows) to stop recording, to add a flag (to mark something important at a specific point in time), and to bring up the main interface, which runs inside a web browser tab.
The tabs are fairly easy to understand: Daily shows what's been happening today, and you can go forwards and backwards through time to see snapshots of your computer's activity, including the programs and websites you had open. You can go forwards and backwards by day, and review any kind of activity.
Head to the Search and Summary tabs, and you can dig deeper into the history that Windrecover has saved. Maybe you want to look for a particular document or web page you had open, for example. You can see the times of day when you're most active on your computer, and get breakdowns of how your screen time is split up.
The Recording & Video Storage and Settings tabs let you access various options for Windrecorder. You can set how many days videos are saved for, choose certain apps or browser tabs to exclude from the recording process, have the program start up at the same time as Windows, see stats on video recorded so far, and more.
Rewind for macOS
Head to rewind.ai to get hold of Rewind for macOS, which is a more mature and more feature-rich application than Windrecorder. You can use Rewind for free, but features such as unlimited searching and a personalized AI bot will cost you $29 a month. (There is a 30-day free trial of Rewind Pro you can try out, and you get a discount on your Pro subscription if you pay for a whole year upfront.)
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Once it's set up, Rewind lives on the menu bar at the top of the screen. Click the Rewind icon (two arrows and two dots) to get around the program's various screens and to configure the application—select Settings and you can set how much storage space Rewind can take up, exclude certain apps from recordings, and set up meeting recordings.
Click the Rewind menu bar button and then Search Rewind, and you're able to look for anything logged in your history on macOS: Just search for the name of an app, or a document, or anything you remember being on screen, and Rewind will find it for you. Results appear as thumbnails, and you can click on any thumbnail to jump back to that particular snapshot in time.
Pick Daily Recap from the Rewind menu, and you get a rundown of the applications you've spent most time in, and the websites you've visited most often—you can click back into the past, day by day, to see your statistics over time. There's also a chart showing the hours of the day when you're most active.
Rewind comes with an AI chatbot built in, too: From the menu pick Ask Rewind to bring up a prompt box. You can ask about anything you've done in the past on macOS—sites you've visited, documents you've opened, information you've seen—and the AI will respond, complete with links back to the relevant part of your macOS history. You can also ask questions about how Rewind works or how to do something inside the app.
