What are all of the Volume Shadow Copy Service commands

Question

Is there a manual on all of the commands to use the Volume Shadow Copy Service?

Answer 1

Hello,

Thank you for posting in Microsoft Q&A.

Based on the description, I understand your question is related to shadow copy.

To create a shadow copy, the requester, writer, and provider perform the following actions:

The requester asks VSS to enumerate the writers, gather the writer metadata, and prepare for shadow copy creation.

Each writer creates an XML description of the components and data stores that need to be backed up and provides it to VSS. The writer also defines a restore method, which is used for all components. VSS provides the writer's description to the requester, which selects the components that will be backed up.

VSS notifies all the writers to prepare their data for making a shadow copy.

Each writer prepares the data as appropriate, such as completing all open transactions, rolling transaction logs, and flushing caches. When the data is ready to be shadow-copied, the writer notifies VSS.

VSS tells the writers to temporarily freeze application write I/O requests (read I/O requests are still possible) for the few seconds that are required to create the shadow copy of the volume or volumes. The application freeze isn't allowed to take longer than 60 seconds. VSS flushes the file system buffers and then freezes the file system, which ensures that the file system metadata is recorded correctly and the data to be shadow-copied is written in a consistent order.

VSS tells the provider to create the shadow copy. The shadow copy creation period lasts no more than 10 seconds, during which all write I/O requests to the file system remain frozen.

VSS releases file system write I/O requests.

VSS tells the writers to thaw application write I/O requests. At this point applications are free to resume writing data to the disk that is being shadow-copied.

Note: The shadow copy creation can be aborted if the writers are kept in the freeze state for longer than 60 seconds or if the providers take longer than 10 seconds to commit the shadow copy.

The requester can retry the process (go back to step 1) or notify the administrator to retry at a later time.

If the shadow copy is successfully created, VSS returns the location information for the shadow copy to the requester. In some cases, the shadow copy can be temporarily made available as a read-write volume so that VSS and one or more applications can alter the contents of the shadow copy before the shadow copy is finished. After VSS and the applications make their alterations, the shadow copy is made read-only. This phase is called autorecovery, and it's used to undo any file-system or application transactions on the shadow copy volume that weren't completed before the shadow copy was created.

Have a nice day.

Best Regards,

Molly

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