HP StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System user guide (440583-005, February 2008)

Mounted drives
A mounted drive is a local volume attached to an empty folder (called a mount point) on an NTFS
volume. When enabling shadow copies on a volume that contains mounted drives, the mounted drives
are not included when shadow copies are taken. In addition, if a mounted drive is shared and shadow
copies are enabled on it, users cannot access the shadow copies if they traverse from the host volume
(where the mount point is stored) to the mounted drive.
For example, assume there is a folder F:\data\users, and the Users folder is a mount point for
G:\. If shadow copies are enabled on both F:\ and G:\, F:\data is shared as \\server1\data,
and G:\data\users is shared as \\server1\users. In this example, users can access previous
versions of \\server1\data and \\server1\users but not \\server1\data\users.
Managing shadow copies
The vssadmin tool provides a command line capability to create, list, resize, and delete volume shadow
copies.
The system administrator can make shadow copies available to end users through a feature called
“Shadow Copies for Shared Folders.” The administrator uses the Properties menu (see Figure 19) to
turn on the Shadow Copies feature, select the volumes to be copied, and determine the frequency
with which shadow copies are made.
Figure 19 System administrator view of Shadow Copies for Shared Folders
The shadow copy cache file
The default shadow copy settings allocate 10 percent of the source volume being copied (with a
minimum of 350 MB), and store the shadow copies on the same volume as the original volume. (See
Figure 20). The cache file is located in a hidden protected directory titled “System Volume Information”
off of the root of each volume for which shadow copy is enabled.
File server management134