VSS is something pushed by MS and all recent OSes by MS support only that method. With win2k3 you are still fine not using it, but later it will be mission impossible.
As for advantages, I would say two main ones are handling of renamed files during incremental backups and handling of open files. There used to be a table in older docs with difference in behaviour between VSS and non VSS approach - let me know if you can't find it.
A quick question about VSS. Can you use VSS to backup normal drives (C:\, D:\ etc..) and do away with the OFA?
Also although we don't use VSS atm, some time ago some clients turned it on seemly by random and a new saveset 'Application Data' showed up which seemed to be some contents of all of the drives, even though it was backing up the C:\ and D:\ drive. So it looked like the same data was being backed up twice. I never quite understood how to tame VSS into doing what you want it to do.
VSS is also used during backup of C and D. You can easily see that when running debug where you will see path used for backup of your volume is coming from VSS snapshot.
I have a questiong too about VSS. We haven't been using it, as before the licenses weren't there and the service wasn't turned on. My understanding is all I have to do is start the service and remove the "VSS:*=off".
I did this on Networker and I saw the following.
VSS SYSTEM BOOT:\
VSS SYSTEM SERVICES:\
VSS USER DATA:\
VSS OTHER:\
VSS SYSTEM FILESET:\
VSS ASR DISK:\
But I also see two other savesets for C:\ and D:\
Why didn't VSS do a backup of these specially? I see in the documentation that you can instruct it by saying VSS:*:=only or VSS:D:\=only etc. Is this what I need to do?
ble1
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September 11th, 2009 08:00
ble1
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September 11th, 2009 08:00
bc9am
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September 11th, 2009 15:00
Also although we don't use VSS atm, some time ago some clients turned it on seemly by random and a new saveset 'Application Data' showed up which seemed to be some contents of all of the drives, even though it was backing up the C:\ and D:\ drive. So it looked like the same data was being backed up twice. I never quite understood how to tame VSS into doing what you want it to do.
ble1
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September 13th, 2009 05:00
jford11
20 Posts
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December 31st, 2009 08:00
I have a questiong too about VSS. We haven't been using it, as before the licenses weren't there and the service wasn't turned on. My understanding is all I have to do is start the service and remove the "VSS:*=off".
I did this on Networker and I saw the following.
VSS SYSTEM BOOT:\
VSS SYSTEM SERVICES:\
VSS USER DATA:\
VSS OTHER:\
VSS SYSTEM FILESET:\
VSS ASR DISK:\
But I also see two other savesets for C:\ and D:\
Why didn't VSS do a backup of these specially? I see in the documentation that you can instruct it by saying VSS:*:=only or VSS:D:\=only etc. Is this what I need to do?