By Philip Churchill on February 05th, 2010
Enable the Shadow Copy Service on WHS
Having the Shadow Copy service on Windows Home Server enables you to recover files that have been changed or deleted. As James Tenniswood states:
This can be really worth while if you’ve ever been caught accidentally saving over a document or erasing a folder, as you can look thought the folder at in any of it’s saved states and either restore or copy the contents to a safe place.
James shows you how to enable the Shadow Copy service and change its default settings, which you can view here.
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Bad idea
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956325
“The Previous Versions functionality for files on Windows Home Server shared folders may not function correctly”
I would like to know if this is a recommended configuration or not. The KB article seems to indicate it applies to the initial release of WHS. If it is one extra layer of protection from accidentally deleting a file, then I want to enable it. But not to the risk of losing any data.
Andrew: Since I have a MediaSmart server, and HP disabled Previous Versions by disabling Shadow Copy, why is this a bad idea?
Has anyone successfully restored something from a shadow copy on their home server? I had this enabled for a while and it looked like it was working great, until I needed to restore a directory. I don’t remember the exact error it was throwing but it said something to the effect that it couldn’t mount the drive?
Gordon: They disabled it because of this issue. Re-enabling it will cause issues, as Derek pointed out. In PP1, MS set it to disabled by default. There have been no updates on the issue since then, so I have no idea if it’s been fixed.
I definately read there were problems due to the way drive extender worked & interaction with the shadow copy service.
I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable enabling this despite it’s usefulness. I do however use an online backup service which also does time based snapshots
So, is there currently no way to have the functionality of Previous Versions with WHS PP3? I have 2+ TB of data now and it is cost-prohibitive to backup online.
As much as I love Duplication, it doesn’t help with human error (whoops, overwrote the folder with an older version)…
Warning, enabling the Shadow Copy service on WHS can cause data corruption (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956325) . fyi, I use http://www.timetravelerwhs.com/ on my WHS which uses a subversion system instead of shadow copy to get around the data corruption issue.