Questions[vss](server)

Is there some obvious method I am not finding for how to setup the periodic creation of shadow copies for a given drive on a system running Windows without a GUI?

From what I can tell going to the Shadow Copies tab of disk properties and clicking the Enable button basically just creates a couple scheduled tasks. These scheduled tasks seem to use some kind of GUID unique to each volume? so this isn't something that I could easily do with a Group Policy.

There must be some simple method to enabling shadow copies from the command line right?

We have shadow copy enabled on our Windows SBS 2008 server. Attempting to restore a file from shadow copy gave the following error-

The source file name(s) are larger than is supported by the file system. Try moving to a location which has a shorter path name, or try renaming to shorter name(s) before attempting this operation.

The filename has 67 characters, and it's shadow copy path is 170 characters. These seem to be under the NTFS limits (260?).

We tried-

• Copying to the shortest path possible (C:)
• Copying to the shortest path possible on both a client computer and the server itself

Is it possible to rename files in a shadow copy, before doing the copy? Any idea why the error is appearing despite the filename size appearing to be within limits?

Steps taken

1. On local computer, go to shared folder on SBS server (via mapped drive), e.g. J:\Projects\Foo\Bar
2. Right click on folder and select Properties
3. Click on the Previous Versions tab.
4. Select a shadow copy and click Open
5. In newly opened window, select folder/file and press Ctrl-C to copy.
6. Open a new Windows Explorer, and paste folder/file onto local drive.

Edit- (Un)fortunately, I am now unable to reproduce this error. The particular files causing the problem have since been deleted, and unable to recreate the error with other, similar files.

How to enable volume shadow copy on specific drive (D:, E:,...) and set up schedule using Powershell ?

I just need some hints how to start.

Many well-known backup utilities for Windows use the Volume Shadow Copy Service built in to newer versions of windows to create a point-in-time snapshot of the disk in order to safely back up open files.

But how well does this mechanism play with SQL Server? I know that an SQL Server VSS Writer exists to help backup systems interoperate with SQL Server, but not all backup systems know about SQL Server and take advantage the backup-related API that it provides.

So my question is, what about the programs that don't know anything about SQL Server?

They presumably get a point-in-time snapshot of the MDF and LDF files as they existed at one single instant. And presumably the SQL Server data format is robust enough that such a snapshot would be guaranteed to be consistent and usable.

Is that the way things work, or am I missing something? Are there "gotchas" about using such a backup mechanism, or would I be safe?

The plan is to create a shadow copy of a quite large, I/O-heavy volume. It's 350GB, containing a filesystem-based fulltext index organized in hundreds of folders and hundred-thousands of tiny files that need to be in a consistent state for a successful restore.

Currently the indexer is stopped, the backup task runs, and then the indexer is restarted. This results in the index being unavailable for hours during the backup. I'd like to make consistent backups via shadow copy, ideally without ever having to stop the indexer at all.

So, I've switched on Shadow Copy for that volume and configured it to make a snapshot once every night, to a different volume.

Now I'm a bit at a loss - how can I access the shadow copy as a whole, so that I can make a backup? I envision a read-only drive that contains the files as they were at the time of the last snapshot, but maybe things work entirely different.

OS is Windows Server 2003 SP2, backup software is CommVault Galaxy 7.0.

EDIT: Note that - in the meantime - two answers have been created that implement the necessary functionality in form of a script:

• VBScript (by myself)
• PowerShell (by John Homer)