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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

Demo: New virtualization technologies in Windows Server (Longhorn)

A nice demo that shows you several things: - Windows Server virtualization (a separate partition running a striped-down version of Windows to manage all other virtual machines) - Running an 8-proc virtual machine - 64-bit and 32-bit machines running concurrently Read More...
Posted Friday, March 02, 2007 12:32 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

How to run Defrag on a scheduled basis

On Windows XP, it's simple. Just run this command and you are done: schtasks /create /TN defrag /RU "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM" /SC weekly /TR "defrag %systemdrive%" Read More...
Posted Friday, April 07, 2006 12:18 AM by AdiOltean | 5 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 | 2 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

Script recipe: How to enumerate dependencies for all resources in a cluster

A few days ago I wanted to gather more data from a cluster on a customer site. I hoped that the uber-management tool for MSCS called CLUSTER.EXE can be used to enumerate the dependencies for all resources in the system, since it can enumerate the dependencies Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 04, 2005 7:00 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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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

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 | 13 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 | 21 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
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