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.

You cannot use directives to skip System save sets, or VSS system savesets because of the following reasons:

  - in the directive, when you sepcify a path, eg: << dir >>,  the dir has to be an absolute path on the file system of whatever operating system it is being used on.

  - the system save sets, eg system state, system files, VSS system boot, etc, does not specify an absolute path in the Windows file system.  Rather, they refer to a specific set of data to be backed up.  i.e. There is no c:\system state, unless you actually created one.

This is why you cannot use directives on the (vss) system savesets.

This is the same reason why you cannot use directives to skip the exchange saveset: msexch:.   msexch does not refere to a path in the file system, but rather a database consisting of different files located in different areas of the file system.

Please look at the NetWorker administrator guide for details on what each system saveset backs up.

Only recourse is not to use saveset=All, but instead explicitely state which disks and/or directories you want to back up.

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