How to skip VSS savesets?

Hi John,

     If it is Windows 2003 you can use VSS:*=off on the backup command of the client. Also you can explicitly mention the savesets. For eg: C:\, D:\ etc

Regards,

Arun

Hi Arun,

Thaks for your answer, but I don't want to switch off VSS on the client.

I tried skipping the savesets by explicitly mentioning their names.

But for some reason that doesn't work on VSS savesets.

Using the NetWorker backup option "VSS:*=off" does not turn off VSS on the Windows 2003 system.  It just tells networker not to backup using the shadow copy.

Note:  Only applicable with Windows 2003.  With Windows 2008, this cannot be used.

That's not what I wanted to hear, but at least I know where I'm at now.

Thanks.

I find it very unfortunate that it's not possible to skip the VSS savesets because, it would be very good if we could back them up with a different group than the filesystem. This is going to be very important in Server 2008 DR backup in 7.6.2 because the DR backup will need to backup all the critical volumes and the DR saveset is just a part of the VSS savesets.

But I wonder, is it possible to specify saveset All with an parameter to skip the VSS savets and only take the filesystem? Thus not using the directives to skip the VSS savesets?

Regards,

Johannes

Hi,

I discovered recently that using the value vss-ntfs in the "save operations" field does what you are looking for. I noticed this while observing an EMC engineer working a webex session with a customer.  I tried to find mentions of this in the documentation set, but it does not seem to be there.  I hope I am remembering it correctly. When he used it, it backed up only the C: and D: drives, using VSS but none of the other VSS system savesets.

anyone else know anything about this "vss-ntfs" ?

does this go under "save set" or "save operations"? no value assigned to it?

saveset "All" and save operations "vss-ntfs" ?

//henric

We just made the discovery of the all-ntfs saveset a few weeks ago. It changes so much how we can manage the storage for our NetWorker because we have Avamar deduplication. To use the saveset All-ntfs makes it possible for us to use the All saveset but at the same time exclude the VSS system state savesets and back the VSS System state savesets to the deduplication. That's very benefitial because VSS system state save sets have a very high deduplication ratio, but at the same time take alot of space (10GB each day per server) on a non deduplication media.

There is information about this saveset on page 63 in the 7.6.1 admin guide but not much. I'm so surprised that this has not been documented more. It seems that there is not much knowledge about this feature. If you look up All-ntfs on the powerlink knowledge base you probably just find this discussion thread.

I wander if there is a penalty by using this method of excluding the VSS savesets?

Johannes

Thanks for sharing this information!

Using the "all-ntfs" as the clients saveset is a very nice option.

Now I can make daily backups of the filesystems and weekly backup of the VSS savesets with the normal "all" saveset.

Works with 7.5.3.4 version.

Well Joka, that just did it! Just did a test and VSS savesets where not backed up.

Thanks a lot, been looking for this for a long long time.

But there is one thing I don't understand in your comment:

"To use the saveset All-ntfs makes it possible for us to use the All saveset but at the same time exclude the VSS system state savesets...."

OK, got that, it's what we are aiming for.

.....and back the VSS System state savesets to the deduplication."

Now i'm confused!

Is that Avamar? If yes, how did you do that?

By using the saveset All-ntfs makes it possible to keep on using the directives as exclude lists instead of using include lists in the saveset (hence, saveset All-ntfs captures all the volumes).

Now we can have special "VSS system state" group with all the clients using the All-ntfs saveset. But in that group we use include list saveset with all the VSS savesets (VSS system fileset, VSS ASR, VSS system state etc,)

That group writes to a pool on the Avamar system, thus the VSS savesets don't take any capacity on the EDL in our case, and deduplicate very well on the Avamar grid. Thus we are using our capacity much better.

Note: This is going to be very important it NetWorker 7.6.2 when the disaster recovery savesets appears for Server 2008 clients. That is, if the Disaster recovery saveset is going to be part of saveset all. It's going to be very important to deduplicate the DR saveset. Those savesets are going to be huge because it needs complete drive C: plus any other drive that has DLL's installed on it.

Johannes

Hi,

As was pointed out here, the all-ntfs keyword is relatively undocumented.  To remedy this, I have created the following knowledgebase article which explains the function of this keyword:

esg120419 - How to backup Windows fileystems while excluding System State data

-Bobby

Hi Bobby.

Thank you for this good article. I wish I had realized this as soon as NW 7.5.1 was out since this helps us make more use of our EDL capacity.

I think it's a good development that in 7.6.2 the VSS savesets won't be part of the save set All.

I also see that the FilesNotToBackup registry key is going to be very important in NetWorker 7.6.2 because of disaster recovery save set that is backed up as part of Full backup of save set All.

Regards,

Johannes