Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Browse by Tags

All Tags » Script recipes » Storage » VSS   (RSS)

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

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 | 2 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

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

Attack of the clones: how to assign a drive letter or directory to a shadow copy

In one of my previous posts I mentioned a simple script to copy a file from a shadow copy. This allows you to access files that are opened exclusively by some application. You won't have enough drive letters... Here I present a similar script (let's call Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 20, 2005 9:37 PM by AdiOltean | 14 Comments

Script recipe of the week: how to copy an opened file

I just read recently a post on the newsgroups - someone wanted to backup her PST file. The problem is that Outlook keeps this file open all the time, therefore we are unable to just copy this file once in a while. Argh... A cute little script Fortunately, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 05, 2005 3:50 AM by AdiOltean | 22 Comments

The VSS (Volume Shadow Copy) SDK is available for download

This is the link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0B4F56E4-0CCC-4626-826A-ED2C4C95C871&displaylang=en You can use this SDK to develop VSS requestors, writers and providers. For example, you can write code that define and use Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 30, 2004 3:40 PM by AdiOltean | 6 Comments

Creating shadow copies from the command line.

A less-known feature in Windows XP and Server 2003 is the command-line support for shadow copies. The command is called VSSADMIN.EXE and is already present in the operating system - just run it without parameters and you will see some sample usage. Here Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 14, 2004 8:44 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

Script Recipe of the week: Shadow Copy secrets

One useful feature that you probably noticed in Windows Server 2003 is Shadow Copies for Shared Folders. I will not give too many details about it – suffice to say that it will create periodic versions of your shares. So if you lost or overwritten a file Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 05, 2004 3:40 AM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments
 
Page view tracker