Cory Collier

I’ve been a Network Administrator for several years now. One of my favorite features on Windows Server 2003 is Shadow Copy. Shadow Copy is a backup feature that allows you to right click a file, and restore that file to a previous version. If the file is missing, you can right click it’s folder, find the file, and put it back!

Shadow Copy is a snapshot of a drive, at a particular moment in time. It’s comparable to incremental backups, kinda.

While Shadow Copy is not intended to replace regular backups, it’s a very handy tool to quickly find files that users lose all of the time. Note, this is only available on Windows Server machines. Your XP and Vista machines aren’t going to do this.

Heres how to use it:

First, make sure the Shadow Copy service is running in the services mmc. You’re looking for the service called ‘Volume Shadow Copy’. Make sure it’s started, and it’s set to Automatically start. Once you have that covered, you can move on.

On the server you wish to use Shadow Copy on, navigate to ‘My Computer’.

Right Click the Drive (usually ‘C:’) that you want to use Shadow Copy on.

Click Properties

Click the tab ‘Shadow Copies’

Click the enable button if it’s not grayed out. If the button is grayed out, then you’re already running Shadow Copy. We’ll assume you’re not, so at least pretend to click the enable button.

Now, click the ‘Settings’ button. You should see the following dialog box:

This is where you set the maxium size you want your shadow copy database to be. As a general rule of thumb, you should never use less than 10% of what your max storage capacity is.

You can also set how often you make Shadow Copies. Keep in mind that the more often you make a Shadow Copy, the more space you will need. The default settings are twice a day, at 7:00am, and 12:00pm. I’ve never found a reason to change this, but I’m sure some of you out there will find plenty of reasons.

Now that Shadow Copy is setup, it’s time to see it in action. Back in the first dialog box we saw , click the ‘Create Now’ button to manually create your first Shadow Copy. Don’t worry, you won’t have to do this again.

Now here’s the sort of tricky part. In order to access the shadow copies that have been created via file or folder, you have to view the folders via net connection.

You can either type in the UNC name of the server (i.e. \\YOUR-SERVER-NAME) and navigate to the folder or file you want, or you can view them over a mapped network drive

Once you do that, THEN you can right click your file, or folder, click on properties, and then click on the ‘Previous Versions’ tab.

From here, you can view a previous version, copy or restore. Usually, your best bet is to view the files you want to restore first. It doesn’t help anyone to restore old files that were wrong to begin with. Get someone else’s (think management) OK before restoring files.