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We have shadow copies enabled on one of our file servers (windows 2003)
We just had to recover a file from this morning and all of the shadow copy points have gone !!!
I've manually forced a shadow copy "Create Now" - and that has worked....
But where and why did our other shadow copies go?
:(
We've seen that on ours as well (2003) One minute there's a whole load of them the next nothing and then it builds back up. It's as if it clears itself out periodically rather than deletes the oldest ones.....
Event Type: Information
Event Source: VolSnap
Event Category: None
Event ID: 33
Date: 22/06/2011
Time: 12:12:07
User: N/A
Computer: FP2
Description:
The oldest shadow copy of volume D: was deleted to keep disk space usage for shadow copies of volume D: below the user defined limit.
I have quite a few entries like the above and then :
Event Type: Error
Event Source: VolSnap
Event Category: None
Event ID: 35
Date: 22/06/2011
Time: 12:30:22
User: N/A
Computer: FP2
Description:
The shadow copies of volume D: were aborted because the shadow copy storage failed to grow.
So it looks like it recursively deleted every shadow copy point trying to recover disk space until they had ALL been deleted....
I've seen them all be wiped when the server shuts down incorrectly (power cut/crash etc) too.
This volume is : 1.2 TB
We have 510Gb free space
Shadow copies is set to 70Gb
Do you think that sounds about the right size?
What are the pros and cons of big or small?
Looks like we are going to have to hit backup exec to recover the users file from yesterday....
Windows PANTS !
It might be worth increasing it a bit, afaik the only cons are that it uses up more disk space - but you've got quite a bit of free space anyway.
Where I worked we used to have a big problem with this, turns out it was the defrag we had running on our servers every weekend, sometimes a defrag will blat all the shadow copies, Microsoft KB 312067 (sorry it wont let me post link since this is my first post -_-). When we moved to 2008 R2 from 2003 I upped the cluster size and havnt seen the issue since
Do not rely on shadow copies, they've never worked perfectly.
However there's a couple of hotfixes around if you look up the eventlogs and you will also gain some good by moving the VSS storage off of the volume you're shadowing - i.e. if you have shadow copies enabled on D: change the settings to keep the storage on a drive you are not shadowing - either a new dedicated volume or another one that doesn't have a lot of shares on
I don't rely on my 2003 shadow copies either as I have seen this weirdness. If shadow copies do let me down I have MDT that will let me go back 3 months for user files. It's a bit more involved than retrieving a previous version but still only an extra minute or 2 to get a file.