How make persistent a shadow copy created by Volume Shadow Service on WinXP

Question

Hi there,


According to VSS documentation, on XP the only supported shadow copy type is “non-persistent with writers” and there is no way to create persistent shadow copies or shadow copies without writers.
But ntbackup uses VSS and according to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy uses a proprietary BKF file format, so the question is How make persistent a shadow copy created by Volume Shadow Service on WinXP? (similar to what ntbackup does)

Thanks a lot.


Javier Andrés Cáceres Alvis

Answer 1

Hello Javier,

Thanks for your post.

VSS backup and restore operations each use a protocol for the interaction of the systems that use mass storage (writers) and those that back it up (requesters).

Both backup and file retrieval operations are primarily driven by the requester, which controls writer and provider behavior by generating systemwide COM events for the writer to process. Because event-generating methods are asynchronous, writers do have limited control into the requester's state through the asynchronous handlers available to VSS (see IVssAsync).

More information
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384618(VS.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384599(VS.85).aspx

Regards,
Rong-Chun Zhang
MSDN Subscriber Support in Forum
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Answer 2

Hi Rong-Chun,

Could you please look at the vshadow sample?
That sample makes persistent shadows on Windows 2003 and non persistent on Windows XP.
The problem is that persistent doesn't mean something like a file, that you can save to other computer.
How can I make the resulting shadow copy a file (like ntbackup does it)?

Javier Andrés Cáceres Alvis

Answer 3

Suggestions?

Javier Andrés Cáceres Alvis