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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

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

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

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 | 3 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

NTFS curiosities (Part I): Short file names

Aaron Stebner noted that it is possible to configure Windows to always use short file names. This is a legacy feature left over from the Windows 95 land. Sometimes, you just have to run some old MS-DOS applications. These apps will get confused about Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 27, 2005 9:42 PM by AdiOltean | 7 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

Script Recipe of the week: Detecting a new disk inserted in the system

Calvin Hsia presented a method to detect a device arrival in Visual Fox Pro. The code looks pretty long, even for a C++ programmer like me :-) I am wondering if there is a shorter variant... Here is a similar code VBScript, which uses WMI events: Set Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 16, 2004 3:15 PM by AdiOltean | 0 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
 
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