kennysarmy Posted June 22, 2011 Posted June 22, 2011 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?
joe90bass Posted June 22, 2011 Posted June 22, 2011 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.....
kennysarmy Posted June 22, 2011 Author Posted June 22, 2011 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....
Dom_ Posted June 22, 2011 Posted June 22, 2011 I've seen them all be wiped when the server shuts down incorrectly (power cut/crash etc) too.
kennysarmy Posted June 22, 2011 Author Posted June 22, 2011 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 !
Dom_ Posted June 22, 2011 Posted June 22, 2011 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.
misterTx Posted June 25, 2011 Posted June 25, 2011 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
synaesthesia Posted June 25, 2011 Posted June 25, 2011 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
ChrisH Posted June 25, 2011 Posted June 25, 2011 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.
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