Tip (Network Admin): Enable Volume Shadow Copy as another layer of backup protection

Restoring files for your users can be a real pain the butt, especially if you are using a tape solution only. Most smaller shops have difficulties with tape restores, as many times they are not labeled properly, or even worse, the restores are never tested, and the tapes go bad without the backup admin even knowing anything...

You know the people..."I just deleted my accounting spreadsheet and I need it back!"

The good news is that you can handle 90% of your day-to-day restore woes from a server share pretty easily without spending a dime (if you have Windows Server 2003).

Server 2003 has included Volume Shadow Services so you can create 'point-in-time' backups of your files. This is an often overlooked feature of Windows Server, so I thought I would post a quick article on it to remind the rest of you busy admins out there that there is help if you need it!

VSS saves delta changes for your shadowed files in the system volume information folder. This information is stored on the drive that is being shadowed (whether it is only a share on that drive or the entire drive), and this can grant you the ability to restore previous revisions of files easily. Depending on the drive space available, you can store many, many previous versions of your files this way.

The nice thing is that your users can take advantage of a VSS-enabled share, merely by right-clicking their home folder (for example), and click on the 'Previous versions' tab. They simply then would double-click the previous version date and copy their files/folders back to the proper location.

One note, however, they will need to uncheck the 'read-only' attribute on whatever they restored.

This can save any IT shop valuable time, as you won't have to juggle a bunch of tapes or wait for your tape library to catalog in order to find out if you have the correct tape or not!

Of course, this doesn't handle the local computer files, so bear that in mind (alluding to my fun cartoon that I found above).

Here is a good resource to review when setting up VSS on your servers: Working with the Windows Server 2003 Volume Shadow Copy Service