Shadow Copy in Windows 2003 and 2008

Shadow copy: New in windows 2003, a new feature or service, this is used to recover the previous version of a file. Shadow copy’s works on shared drives.

Ex: Your marketing team has prepared some great presentation to be displayed in a meeting. Unfortunately some of the data was deleted from the PPT file. In order to recover the lost data, with the use of shadow copy we need to move to previous version and recover.  

Practical work:

Just create a txt or doc file and type in few words. Save the file on C drive. Then

1. Right click on MY computers-à manage-à right click on Shared Folders-àall tasks -à configure shadow copy

Now create a new shadow copy and go ahead and erase all the data on the TXT file.

Save it.

So in order to recover the last data.

Open the C drive as network share.

\\server1\c$

Then go to TXT file you have create and right click and properties àyou will find a previous versions tab. Click on this and you can easily view and restore the shadows.

The above was just the concept. But as a system admin. We need to perform the below steps. Users in a company may have XP, vista or windows 7 clients.

We need to install a shadow copy client MSI file on to client machines or you can also deploy the file using group policy or SMS.

We can find the file on windows 2003 and 2008 servers.

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CLIENTS\TWCLIENT\X86

Once this MSI file is installed the clients will automatically find the previous versions tab and will them self recover the previous versions!!

Types of virtualization

1. Operating system virtualization: the virtualizationof a guest OS ON thin hyper visor that manages access to hardware resources
2. Application virtualization: deploying applications without reliance on an installation directly to an OS
3. Storage virtualization: The presentation of logical storage structure that resides on one or more physical storage devices.