Shadow copies is a new feature of Windows Server 2003 that automatically creates point-in-time copies or snapshots of files in shared folders. This lets users recover accidentally overwritten or deleted work without the need to ask an administrator to restore from backup, which saves administrators a lot of time and headache.
Windows Server: Restoring Shadow Copies Using the Command Line
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This is like the samba vfs recycle module that I have been using since early samba 2.x days.
Uh no Shadow copies and the recyle bin are two different things.
From: http://info.ccone.at/INFO/Samba/VFS.html
Chapter 20. Stackable VFS modules
Prev Part III. Advanced Configuration
A Recycle Bin-like module. Where used, unlink calls will be intercepted and files moved to the recycle directory instead of being deleted. This gives the same effect as the Recycle Bin on Windows computers.
The Recycle Bin will not appear in Windows Explorer views of the network file system (share) nor on any mapped drive. Instead, a directory called .recycle will be automatically created when the first file is deleted. Users can recover files from the .recycle directory. If the recycle:keeptree has been specified, deleted files will be found in a path identical with that from which the file was deleted.
Shadow copy is much more than that:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/scrfaq…
“This is like the samba vfs recycle module that I have been using since early samba 2.x days.”
Not even close.
anything that MS does has been done xx years ago. Kinda funny that _SOME_ people are such OS bigots they don’t even do a cursory review of the technology much less the article.
Anyways – I am OS agnostic and I use Linux/Mac/Windows on a daily basis depending on server or desktop I am on.
Shadow copy has its perks but can be a resource hog and a sysadmin should tweak the default runtimes/values to best fit their org.
FreeBSD’s had filesystem snapshots too since Jan 2003.
If the GNU Samba rabble would support them in samba, there’d be one less reason to use Windows 2003 Server.
actually as a novell fan, i am more quick to point out that this feature has been a godsend on more than one occasion.
the linux+samba combo needs to quickly adopt this as a feature.
that being said, i am glad windows is getting this feature, since almost all of the networks i have do deal with nowdays are windows based.
“Windows Server 2003 also includes a command-line utility called vssadmin that can be used to manage shadow copies on the server side”
VSSADMIN: doesn’t that reek of sourcesafe…
I don’t think Linux or Samba have this, but I do remember old-school VMS users working with automatically numbered versions of their files.
Seems to make sense, since much of the Windows NT “inspiration” came from VMS.
Why restrict it to shared folders though? That smells of confusion.. this should be a settable property of any ordinary directory of the filesystem.
//Have they worked out that CLI has significance on a server or is that they haven’t ported it to a GUI yert?//
As you undoubtedly know, there’s *very little* you CANNOT do via command line in Windows 200x.
Who ya gonna call? FUD-BUSTERS.