Shadow Copies

[Gambit]

Hopefully this thread is in the right spot.

Currently my SS has a daily backup, every morning at 3am. This works fine for 99 percent of the time. However, I have had issues before when Bob "accidentally" deletes his presentation project on Monday, but they fail to tell me until Thursday and his project is due on Friday. Currently there is no way for me retrieve the document. I was looking into enabling shadow copies for the students that way I can set the back up a few days apart. Instead of 24hrs. Is this idea any good? Is it even possible?

Spec's are: Win2k3, XP w/ SP2 using NTFS Format.

[Geoff]

Shadow copies are great for this sort of 'accidental' deletion. The default scheduling runs at 7am and 12pm. So you end up with a morning and an afternoon snapshot.

[tosca925]

We are set up as the same as Geoff and we have no problems...................in fact it saves us loads of time since we starting using it.


I suppose in your case it depends on how much drive space you are allocating to it.

[Gambit]

Thanks for the quick replies.

I am just reading up on shadow copies now to gather some info

quick question, can i set shadow copies for a shared folder on the drive or does it have to be the entire drive???

[Kyle]

Have a read of this.

[maniac]

You can shadow copy individual folders, we have this enabled on our storage server. It saves hours of time, because users can restore the files themselves, once given the easy to follow guide we've produced,

We have a copy taken at 6:00am and a copy taken at 12:00pm which works well for us. However, we still take a daily backup just to make sure. You can never have too many backups!

Mike.

[beeswax]

like maniac, apart from not allowing the users to restore for themselves. we back up at 7am and 12 noon, but also run normal back up of the system

[StewartKnight]

Shadow Copies is easy to setup and well worth doing, although it does have the overhead of using up more disc space.

[ChrisH]

Shadow Copies is easy to setup and well worth doing, although it does have the overhead of using up more disc space.

But its quiete minimal for what it can cover though with a twice daily snapshot.

[simongrahamuk]

The only disadvantage with Shadow Copies is that you can shadow copy to a network drive. It has to be a drive on you local server.

[Uraken]

You can shadow copy individual folders, we have this enabled on our storage server.
Mike.

Is this possible on windows 2003 server standard build? i can't work out how to do an individual share? also i only have two drives in the server i want to shadow copy. Which are c: and d: drive, the stuff i want to have saved is the kids users areas but will only be able to copy it self on to the same drive ie d: is there any major performance issues doing it like this or should i consider external HDD etc?

[Uraken]

like maniac, apart from not allowing the users to restore for themselves. we back up at 7am and 12 noon, but also run normal back up of the system

so you just give admin staff access to recover lost files then beeswax does that work well for you? any particular reason why you decided against given it out to all?