DeltacCopy and Volume Shadow Service

Hi all,

I've just signed up, so I thought I would contribute something to get the ball rolling.

I looked through existing forum posts and saw a few people wanting to using Microsoft's Volume Shadow Service with DeltaCopy. If we could get these to work together, DeltaCopy could back up open and even currently active files, such as virtual machines. After a lot of reading and scouring various websites, I came up with the information needed to get this working. In fact, rsync is backing up a shadow drive as I type this!

Microsoft has released a couple of utilities which make this all possible: vshadow.exe and dosdev.exe. vshadow is a utility that allows the creation of shadow copies. dosdev lets you map drive letters to these shadow copies. Once you've done that, just point DeltaCopy at that drive and do your copy.

Of course, nothing is ever as easy as THAT. First, these two utilities are not so easy to find/get. I'll make it simple: utilities!. Technically, dosdev isn't necessary if you're running DeltaCopy on Windows 2003 server, because vshadow itself supports drive mapping. But that's not the case on WinXP - a platform I suspect more people here are using than Win2k3. Since I'm making that assumption, I've included only the WinXP version of vshadow.exe. If you need another one, you'll have to go and find it yourself.

Once you have these two utilities, drop them into the DeltaCopy install folder. Now you need to create a couple of CMD scripts in the DeltaCopy folder: vss-exec.cmd and vshadow.cmd. vss-exec will do the work of mounting/unmounting the shadow copy and doing the actual rsync. vshadow.cmd invokes vshadow.exe with our particular options. vshadow.cmd is what you would add as a scheduled task.

vss-exe.cmd should contain this:"V" is the drive letter I've chosen to serve as the mount point for the shadow copy. If that one is used on your system (or you just can't stand the letter "V"), feel free to change it to any other free drive letter.

The rsync line was obtained by running DeltaCopy client and right-clicking on my profile and choosing "Display Run Command". Only the target drive letter has been modified to point to the mounted shadow copy instead of the original drive to be backed up.

vshadow.cmd looks like this:"c:" is the drive you want to back up. Now when you run vshadow.cmd it will create a shadow copy of your C: drive, mount it as V:, do the rsync, unmount the V: drive and destroy the shadow copy.

To back up another drive (or folder on a drive) just create a new vshadow.cmd, changing the drive letter/path and naming it something descriptive, such as "c-drive-backup.cmd". Add that as a scheduled task and you're done.

I hope this is helpful. It took a LOT of digging to get this right, though in the end it seems so simple.

The rsync I was running on a shadow volume just finished successfully (it was the first time through, so it took a while). In modifying things to back up my D: drive, I've realized a couple of things.

As described above, this works perfectly for backing up your C: drive. When it comes to modifying things to back up another drive, you should probably create new copies of BOTH scripts, modifying them to suit each backup. This will allow you to specify different places for each drive's file set. For example, I've renamed vss-exec.cmd to system.cmd and vshadow.cmd to c-backup.cmd. system.cmd remains unchanged, while c-backup.cmd becomes:The only modification was changing vss-exec.cmd to system.cmd.

Now in order to back up your D: drive, for example, copy both files, naming one d-backup.cmd and the other workspace.cmd (my choices, you can call them anything you want). Modify d-backup.cmd to point to workspace.cmd and the D: drive:Modify the contents of workspace.cmd to reference "Workspace" instead of "System":This way, you can run both c-backup.cmd and d-backup.cmd as separate tasks without them running over each other. Each will be in its own folder on the backup device, C: in System and D: in Workspace. Modify these names to suit your own situation.

Uh, that was me above. Somehow I was logged out before I could post. Ah well...

Hello Firend's,

I'm very interrested to use this option...

Is there any complete HowTo somewhere ?

tks,

Snoopyski

This is a great post and works well for using DeltaCopy and VSS.

This is for the author of DeltaCopy;

Since this program has made it so easy to use rsync within a GUI, is there any way you can add VSS support to the program so this part is more GUI driven instead of having to go back to manually editing scripts all the time which I feel defeats the purpose of DeltaCopy?

I figure DeltaCopy is the best (and thanks for making the software and supporting free software) for ease of use without having to create or modify scripts and adding VSS support would make this the #1 best rsync for Windows available.

Thanks! I agree that VSS support should be made part of DeltaCopy itself. In fact, I've stopped using DeltaCopy entirely. I just let my scripts do their thing via Windows' scheduled tasks. But I would rather have a GUI to control this stuff.

zigguratt,

Do you know how you can do this with vssadmin? I know how VSS works and all, but never tried to create or manage it. Your above script is nice, and been doing research and found out about vssadmin and it seems that vssadmin is built into XP and beyond and I'm trying to get it to work that way instead, but running into little roadblocks here and there since I'm new to it.

Any help on writing a script using vssadmin would be nice.

Another note to the author,

Can you add a part to exclude files and folders? I've been messing around with excludes and it's starting to get really long in the options and now it seems I'm doing typos or something else wrong so now I'm getting errors. GUI part for excludes in DeltaCopy would make it easier too.

Sorry, I've since moved on to Windows 7 and no longer have access to an XP system. The vssadmin.exe that is built into Win7 seems to be lacking the necessary commands to be of use for this purpose. Specifically, it can't create shadow copies.

Why do you need to switch to vssadmin anyway? vshadow/dosdev do the job quite nicely...

Thanks very much for this.

Just one thing isn't clear - what's in vss-setvar.cmd ??

Thanks!

zigguratt wrote:Hi all,

I've just signed up, so I thought I would contribute something to get the ball rolling.

I looked through existing forum posts and saw a few people wanting to using Microsoft's Volume Shadow Service with DeltaCopy. If we could get these to work together, DeltaCopy could back up open and even currently active files, such as virtual machines. After a lot of reading and scouring various websites, I came up with the information needed to get this working. In fact, rsync is backing up a shadow drive as I type this!

Microsoft has released a couple of utilities which make this all possible: vshadow.exe and dosdev.exe. vshadow is a utility that allows the creation of shadow copies. dosdev lets you map drive letters to these shadow copies. Once you've done that, just point DeltaCopy at that drive and do your copy.

Of course, nothing is ever as easy as THAT. First, these two utilities are not so easy to find/get. I'll make it simple: utilities!. Technically, dosdev isn't necessary if you're running DeltaCopy on Windows 2003 server, because vshadow itself supports drive mapping. But that's not the case on WinXP - a platform I suspect more people here are using than Win2k3. Since I'm making that assumption, I've included only the WinXP version of vshadow.exe. If you need another one, you'll have to go and find it yourself.

Once you have these two utilities, drop them into the DeltaCopy install folder. Now you need to create a couple of CMD scripts in the DeltaCopy folder: vss-exec.cmd and vshadow.cmd. vss-exec will do the work of mounting/unmounting the shadow copy and doing the actual rsync. vshadow.cmd invokes vshadow.exe with our particular options. vshadow.cmd is what you would add as a scheduled task.

vss-exe.cmd should contain this:REM read the shadow volume variables call vss-setvar.cmd REM define the temporary drive letter dosdev V: %SHADOW_DEVICE_1% REM rsync the shadow device rsync -v -rlt -z --delete "/cygdrive/V//" "localhost::Backup//System" REM delete the temporary drive letter dosdev -r -d V: "V" is the drive letter I've chosen to serve as the mount point for the shadow copy. If that one is used on your system (or you just can't stand the letter "V"), feel free to change it to any other free drive letter.

The rsync line was obtained by running DeltaCopy client and right-clicking on my profile and choosing "Display Run Command". Only the target drive letter has been modified to point to the mounted shadow copy instead of the original drive to be backed up.

vshadow.cmd looks like this:vshadow -script=vss-setvar.cmd -exec=vss-exec.cmd c: "c:" is the drive you want to back up. Now when you run vshadow.cmd it will create a shadow copy of your C: drive, mount it as V:, do the rsync, unmount the V: drive and destroy the shadow copy.

To back up another drive (or folder on a drive) just create a new vshadow.cmd, changing the drive letter/path and naming it something descriptive, such as "c-drive-backup.cmd". Add that as a scheduled task and you're done.

I hope this is helpful. It took a LOT of digging to get this right, though in the end it seems so simple.

thenon wrote:Thanks very much for this.

Just one thing isn't clear - what's in vss-setvar.cmd ??

Thanks!

Hi, thenon.

The vss-setvar.cmd file is generated by vshadow.exe. It contains references to the shadow set created by vshadow which are used by my script to map a drive letter to the shadow copy.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 04/15/2010 08:18:04

This worked for me. Backing up 30 production PC's to my Ubuntu domain controller running rsync daemon. Every 2 hours backups are launched with a 3 minute interval on all 30 PC's.
I have a couple of PC running accounting software and shadowcopy is a must to backup their databases.

I launch my backup task with this VBS script so there is no command prompt window.

Haven't had any problems, but by not using DeltaCopy client I lost the option to mail me if there is an error. I think I could mail a log file with BLAT every time the backup ends, but I can't get my head around to how notify me only on errors. Any ideas?

Of course it would be better to have a shadow copy option inside the client itself

and then I would definitely choose the GUI version over all these scripts.