VSS junk showing up out of the blue

[Chapter11]

I have a large number of Windows clients that I back up, a mix of various versions of Windows.

Since this weekend, many of them are generating savesets with "VSS"-related names. These have never shown up before in my system.

Some of them are taking inordinate amounts of time to back up - one in particular seems to be the same size as one of its drive letters (500G on a static filesystem as part of the daily incremental). Others are failing for various reasons.

Can someone give me a quick overview of what these are, if they are important, and how to exclude them if necessary? I've never had to restore a "SYSTEM STATE" or "SYSTEM FILES" or "ASR" or any of those older "special" savesets as part of a normal restore or DR, as our procedures are not built around them.

 

[605]

VSS is a MS specific backup mechanism based on the volume copy service. NW can trigger Windows to create VSS backups ...
- if the appropriate client version is installed ( i think it wasn 7.0)
- this feature has been licensed

If you have not added a VSS license, VSS should not be used, unless you have a NW install still running in eval mode.

If you want to disable this feature ...
- open your client resource
- find the parameter "save operations" and
- enter this string "VSS:*=off"

This will enforce NW to use the legacy/normal backup mechanism.

 

[Chapter11]

Thanks for the info. We did add a license for Volume Shadowcopy Service for Windows recently (the time seems to match anyway), although I was under the impression it was licensed like a BSM (NOTES, MSSQL), instead of a basic type-enabler (Unix, Linux, Windows, Netware).