Shadow Copies of folders and files in Windows 2003 for NTFS formatted volumes

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pankaj Khanzode
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Pankaj Khanzode

Hi,

The new feature in Windows 2003 "Shadow Copies of Files and Folders" enables
to maintain the version of files/folders wrt point in time for restore
purposes. It can be enabled and configured on volume basis. I am curious to
know whether there is any "programatic way" (say using some IOCTLs, or APIs,
or using WMI classes information) to get informatin about -
1. For which volumes the feature has been "Turned ON"?
2. What is the maximum space configured?
3. How much space it is exactly using?
4. What are files/folders for which the snapshot has been taken? how many
versions do they have? etc.
5. What is the frequency of the snapshot/shadow copy to be taken?

Any help in this regard would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Pankaj
--
Pankaj V. Khanzode,
Member of Technical Staff,
Persistent Systems Private Limited,
Pune 411 016
INDIA
 
Thanks a lot Adi for your response. It indeed answered many queries.

Adi Oltean said:
Hi Pankaj,
3. How much space it is exactly using?
Click to expand...

[adi] When the first shadow copy is created, then it is usually
100-300 Mb of disk space. This space grows as soon as you have new
writes to the disk.
Click to expand...

WIN32_ShadowStorage also gives information about current usage of total
space configured. To get a list of all Volumes for which shadow copy service
is enabled, one can use WMI and query WMI class Win32_ShadowCopy.
It directly givesthe volume GUID for which it has been enabled.
4. What are files/folders for which the snapshot has been taken? how many
versions do they have? etc.
Click to expand...

[adi] All the files/folders on the volume will be snapshotted at the
scheduled times.
Click to expand...

Can I really know where the versions of the files are stored? I mean if I
try to
look at such a volume from Windows NT4.0, I would obvious see less space,
but then can I recover that space?

Moreover, can I get how much space is used by this service on per file
basis? Say, I
wish to know overhead of enebling this service per file/folder that data may
be useful
to the hotsopts (i.e. most frequently accessed part of volume)?

Thanks for the help.

-
Pankaj V. Khanzode
 
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