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[–] 17 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Are shadow copies like snapshots?

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  • [–] 23 points 5 months ago* (3 children)

    Yes, they are essentially file snapshots. Shadow copies in a Microsoft environment at least are basically file history without using file history. So when you modify a file when it's enabled, it makes a copy of the last version of the file.

    But since it's not meant to be a actual backup solution, it's meant to be on a file-by-file basis. I think that means they had to go through and manual restore n a file by file basis

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    If I remember correctly, we were able to restore folders from the shadow copies. I certainly didn’t go file by file. I might have used a tool to do it. But as you pointed out, it’s not a proper backup so we had to do quite a bit of reconciliation to make sure we restored everything and document anything we couldn’t restore.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, shadow copies on Windows servers are snapshots of files. They allow users to see previous versions of a file.

    It’s not really intended as a backup solution on its own, but some backup software does use the volume shadow copy service (VSS) to perform backups on Windows servers.

    I was basically restoring files from this prompt in Windows.

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