Shadow copies is another valuable option new to Windows 2003 server. It allows you and even better your users the option to recover files as they were previously, saving you as the administrator both time and resources. Here I discuss how to setup and configure shadow copy and how to use it when you need a file.

Where is the shadow copy option?

The shadow copy option appears on NTFS drives on Windows 2003 server. To configure it is easy, you simply right click the drive, select properties and you will see the shadow copy tab (see below). You can enable them straight away and as you can see if you wish to create a backup copy straight away you just select “create now”.

What Does Shadow copy do?

You need to be aware that shadow copy only makes shadow copies of shared folders. If it ain’t shared it ain’t being shadow copied. Always try and create the shadow on a different disk if possible.

Things you need to know about shadow copy

You can schedule the shadow copies to happen when you want but microsoft advise not creating more than one an hour. The default when setup is for twice daily copies to be made at 7 and 12. I think these are fine for most companies but if you wish to change then simply click on the schedule button.
You should also be aware that it won’t go on creating shadow copies for ever or until it runs out of disk space. There is a maximum of 64 shadow copies before it starts overwriting them again.
And most importantly of all shadow copy is not an excuse to throw all your existing backup software out of the window. You still need to backup, take offsite etc as normal.

Shadow Copy Clients

I mentioned at the beginning of this article that shadow copies can also be used by the user for recovering previous versions of their documents etc. If the users are aware of how to do this it can save you valuable time locating and restoring from backup media. They will need a client installed to be able to use this facility. The client installation can be found in the system32\clients\twclient directory on the windows 2003 servers. You can either stick this client on a share available to everyone or even better
deploy it automatically using group policy.