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A simple way to access Shadow Copies in Vista

In the past, I presented various ways to browse these mysterious device objects called "shadow copies". Shadow copies are static images in time (snapshots) of your volume contents, at some point in the past. These shadow copies are volumes on Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 28, 2008 10:37 AM by AdiOltean | 29 Comments

Previous Versions in Vista - on Channel 9!

Hot and fresh from Channel 9: a session on Shadow Copies in Vista, and its applications: Previous Versions and the brand-new System Restore. Check it out . Read More...
Posted Monday, February 26, 2007 6:29 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

WS-Management? Already here in Vista!

WS-Management is a new web services-based management protocol. It's SOAP-based of course, and it is compatible with the rest of the specifications in the WS-* Web Service stack, like WS-Transfer, WS-Enumeration, WS-Addressing. WS-Management is enabled Read More...
Posted Friday, August 18, 2006 10:19 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments

Ahh, backups... the eternal conversation subject

Finally! The wait is over. Brett Shirley started to blog. As I expected, Brett started with a highly technical, but very interesting story . You might not believe it, but many customers are very optimistic, and they never perform backups of their critical Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 05, 2006 4:49 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

Getting the free space available under a certain directory

There is a useful function called GetDiskFreeSpaceEx( ) . The GetDiskFreeSpaceEx function retrieves information about the amount of space that is available on a disk volume, which is the total amount of space, the total amount of free space, and the total Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 31, 2006 8:25 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

More VSHADOW stuff: how to backup Exchange, SQL, NTFS

While researching for the previous post, I just started a few searches for VSHADOW on the internet, and I found more interesting usages of it. One example: EqualLogic published a nice technical report of using VSHADOW to backup/restore Exchange, SQL and Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 25, 2006 12:47 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

Fast backup of Virtual Server images (using VSHADOW)

Jeff Trumbull published a very nice script on how to backup a Virtual Server image wiht about one minute of downtime! The solution uses VSHADOW.EXE, a small command-line utility that can be used to create shadow copies. VSHADOW is part of the VSS SDK Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 25, 2006 12:39 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

The VDS API is now public on MSDN

The VDS API is now live on MSDN ! What is it? VDS offers a COM-based API for volume, disk and LUN management in Windows Server 2003. In Windows Server 2003 R2, we also have additional integration with iSCSI targets and MPIO. For example, you can use it Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 05, 2006 4:04 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments

How to do atomic writes in a file

Let's assume that you want is to write some simple code that writes to a text file. A few assumptions: 1) You need avoid corruptions of any kind. 2) Either all of your writes have to make it to the disk, or none of them. 3) The file is updated serially Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 28, 2005 2:51 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

DOSDEV.EXE - a misterious tool

Once in a while, you might encounter this tool in some Microsoft-provided SDKs, or Resource Kits, for example in the Windows Resource Kit, the Exchange Report Toolkit, and others. But this tool never came with any relevant documentation. It just displays Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 04, 2005 6:51 PM by AdiOltean | 4 Comments

WS-Management specification submitted to DMTF

WS-Management was just submitted to DMTF! WS-Management is a web-service based spec for system management tasks like resource discovery, events, executing of certain operations, etc: [...] this specification identifies a core set of Web service specifications Read More...
Posted Monday, September 19, 2005 4:41 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

Playing with transportable snapshots

Transportable shadow copies are another practical consequence of a new paradigm - the data is stored in the (SAN) cloud. The data availability is not anymore tied to your machine. This simple fact has far reaching consequences. One consequence is the Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 2:31 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

How to query the list of disks/partitions for a certain volume (and viceversa)

A good comment in one of my previous posts : >>> Any idea how to get a Volume Name ( \\?\Vol{GUID }) or drive letter for a given disk XX + partition XX? i.e. If I have a partition table for DiskDrive0 I need to find out what volume/drive letter Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 04, 2005 9:13 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments

Transactions for the masses - Transactional NTFS

There is a new blog on my radar - Malcom Smith started to write about Transactional NTFS here: http://blogs.msdn.com/because_we_can/default.aspx Transactional NTFS (or TxF as we call it here) is a very exciting technology. The idea is extremely simple: Read More...
Posted Monday, April 25, 2005 6:39 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

In the old days of MS-DOS and Windows 95 you could identify any volume by its drive letter. Things were so easy. But not anymore after we shipped Windows 2000. In W2K you could also have mount points - volumes mounted under certain directories. This feature Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 16, 2005 11:51 PM by AdiOltean | 14 Comments
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