Shadow copies and drive defragmentation
When running Disk Defragmenter on a volume with shadow copies activated, all or some of the shadow
copies may be lost, starting with the oldest shadow copies.
If defragmenting volumes on which shadow copies are enabled, use a cluster (or allocation unit) size
of 16 KB or larger. Using this allocation unit size reduces the number of copy outs occurring on the
snapshot. Otherwise, the number of changes caused by the defragmentation process can cause shadow
copies to be deleted faster than expected. Note, however, that NTFS compression is supported only
if the cluster size is 4 KB or smaller.
NOTE:
To check the cluster size of a volume, use the
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo
command. To change
the cluster size on a volume that contains data, back up the data on the volume, reformat it using
the new cluster size, and then restore the data.
Mounted drives
A mounted drive is a local volume attached to an empty folder (called a mount point) on an NTFS
volume. When enabling shadow copies on a volume that contains mounted drives, the mounted drives
are not included when shadow copies are taken. In addition, if a mounted drive is shared and shadow
copies are enabled on it, users cannot access the shadow copies if they traverse from the host volume
(where the mount point is stored) to the mounted drive.
For example, assume there is a folder
F:\data\users
, and the
Users
folder is a mount point for
G:\
.
If shadow copies are enabled on both
F:\
and
G:\
,
F:\data
is shared as
\\server1\data
, and
G:\data\users
is shared as
\\server1\users
. In this example, users can access previous versions of
\\server1\data
and
\\server1\users
but not
\\server1\data\users
.
Managing shadow copies
The vssadmin tool provides a command line capability to create, list, resize, and delete volume shadow
copies.
The system administrator can make shadow copies available to end users through a feature called
“Shadow Copies for Shared Folders.” The administrator uses the Properties menu (see
) to
turn on the Shadow Copies feature, select the volumes to be copied, and determine the frequency
with which shadow copies are made.
HP ProLiant DL100 G2 Storage Server administration guide
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Summary of Contents for ProLiant DL100 G2 DPSS
Page 12: ...12 ...
Page 18: ...18 About this guide ...
Page 26: ...26 The HP storage server solution ...
Page 46: ...46 Storage management overview ...
Page 134: ...134 Troubleshooting servicing and maintenance ...
