Unlocking VSS Secrets: A Comprehensive Guide for IT Professionals (Volume Shadow Service)

If you have experience doing backups you have learned about “Volume Shadow Copy Service”. But do you understand how it really works? Knowing how it works makes for better troubleshooting. We will explore how backup applications work with VSS to produce reliable backups for Windows Servers and Applications. Learn the components of VSS and how to use the command-line tools to investigate the workings of “snapshots and shadow copies”. How is it different from cloud applications using “snapshots” and how to troubleshoot the problems with VSS?

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[kirillkarabanov]

Great just great! It's rare to find content of this technical depth on the Windows platform these days. Thanks for your hard work!

[MawuviCan]

This is fantastic. You teach really well. Your voice is a teacher's voice (in my world).

[tayroncalvo]

Excellent video, really appreciate your efforts to deliver such a great content!

[martinm]

This is GREAT material tbh, way more explicit than other sources, thanks!

[ChrisRogers-lydr]

Thank for all the work you put into this. I've learned so much!

[skffingtonai]

Thank you for your efforts and in-depth explanation of VSS. 👍👏

[spongygryphon]

Nice, answered everything I was wondering about VSS, greatly presented!

[docteurgreene]

WOW Lowell I think this is your most complex video ever done 😃
VSS and Backup systems in general are really complicated to understand, but when all is running fine it's ok until you have a problem and you realize it's very hard to troubleshoot.
I had two types of issues with VSS on servers:
- when you run vssadmin list writers and the "system" writer is not listed anymore, you know you will have a hard time troubleshooting. I had this issue on 2 servers and I spent many DAYS trying to solve the issue but at the end I re-installed the server, so I never knew what was the root cause (I hate to do that but sometimes we have no choice).
- then some years ago a lot of our files servers became full of used space on C: drive and also on Data drives, I got into VSS to realize it was because of this UNBOUNDED setting by default, a lot of shadow copies were eating all my drives. I set it to 300 MB and deleted the old shadow copies and then I was able to have a lof of space back (on one data disk I even got HUNDREDS of GB back after this cleanup!!!).
I will download you notes because I know I will learn new stuff, thanks again for all this amazing work.

[nanosni]

Great tutorial! Thank you once again .

[johnsenchak]

GREAT VIDEO, KEEP SENDING THEM DOWNLOADED THE NOTES