BrainlessIdeas

The Auslogics boys from down-under brought this to my attention – could definitely explain why I’ve been ‘loosing’ restore points.

Don’t lose your system restore points!
via How to Defrag Your Hard Drive Properly.

Lost system restore points in Windows are a common complaint with people using disk defragmenters on machines running Vista and later Windows versions. What happens is the defrag operation moves files around causing the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to create snapshots that overwrite older ones and cause restore points to get deleted.

debianhelp.wordpress.com

Haven’t checked out many of the guides here, but this one looks very indepth:

To Do List After installing Linux Mint 16 OS | Linux Support.

[Volume] Shadow Copy

Evidently, shadow copy has been around for quite some time. I became aware of it at the beginning of Win7, but it has been possible since XP (though far more of a Server technology).

Win8 brings full Volume Shadow Copy to the desktop, and is one of the coolest features of MS’s newest OS.

System Restore is basically the basis for shadow copy, but on a full drive level. Shadow Copy is at the file level and allows prior file versions to be recovered.

XP and Vista supported System Restore and Windows Server of the same vintage supported Shadow Copy.

MS’s recent server 2008/12 and Windows 8 allow for shadow copies to be stored on a different location than the protected drive. XP/Vista/7 do not. This is a very nice feature and one that should not be dismissed.

Here are a bunch of links on the subject:

http://edgylogic.com/blog/vshadow-exe-versions/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc788055.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adioltean/archive/2004/12/14/301868.aspx

http://securityweekly.com/2012/10/volume-shadow-copies-the-los.html

http://superuser.com/questions/482155/creating-disk-snapshots-in-windows-7

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/VShadow-Sample-f6dd3cae#content

http://vscsc.sourceforge.net/

FILES:
vshadow-versions
vssown