Volume Shadow Copy Or Wasted Hard Drive Space

Okay, when I first heard about Vista one of the things that I thought was
really cool was that it would allow for a local version of Previous Versions
(Volume Shadow Copy, or TimeWarp) that would allow a file that was accidently
changed, deleted, or otherwise lost to be "returned" to a previous state. I
was quite happy as I had seen it in action at the server level with Windows
Server 2003, and I knew that my kids and wife (and myself believe it or not)
could really use something like this on occasion. Like when my daughter had
worked for 3 days on a book report just to save over it on accident with a
letter to her grandma. So hurray, yet another way for Microsoft for coming up
with a way to further stupid proof its software for the masses (and yes this
still includes me).

Well over a year later I finally got a laptop with Vista Home Premium (as
the retailer did not sell laptops with Ultimate without paying for an upgrade
that was more expensive then the Anytime upgrade option) and was happy. Well
a couple months after that (last Tuesday) I screwed up a spreadsheet as I am
apt to do and was freaking out until I remembered about the Volume Shadow
Copy feature. So I start looking online as how to access this feature and
find out that it is only available in Business Editions and up. Well no big
deal I backed up the spreadsheet to disc the month previous so all my work
was not lost.

But then I found out that actually the Home versions of Vista do have Volume
Shadow Copy, and they even make the same "snapshots" as the Business and Up
versions do. But you just can't access these snapshots via "previous
versions".

So now I am thinking... And I wonder why should I be dedication up to 15%
percent of my hard drive to this if I can't access it. So the first thing I
do is try and find out exactly how much room this is taking up on my system
and find out that running VSSADMIN in an elevated command prompt can show me
and I find that about 12% of my hard drive is being used by Volume Shadow
Copy. So can I turn it off and get this back. Well yes, but then I throw out
System Restore in the process. So that is out because I like to try things
and explore the net, and System restore is my best friend in that regard. I
also could go ahead and use VSSADMIN to resize the size of the volume shadow
copy, but that reduces the number of system restores, and still leaves me
with old copies of files that I cannot access.

So is there any way I can either a access these files without upgrading, or
if that is not possible to not have it shadow copy my files in the first
place?
--
piook is a long standing psuedo-name that resulted from a typo on the old
computer game "Where in the USA IS Carmen Sandiego", and it stuck.


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Hi,

Are you referring to Previous Versions?
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/shadow.html


Regards,
Bert Kinney MS-MVP Shell/User
http://bertk.mvps.org
Member: http://dts-l.org

piook wrote:
> Okay, when I first heard about Vista one of the things that I thought was
> really cool was that it would allow for a local version of Previous Versions
> (Volume Shadow Copy, or TimeWarp) that would allow a file that was accidently
> changed, deleted, or otherwise lost to be "returned" to a previous state. I
> was quite happy as I had seen it in action at the server level with Windows
> Server 2003, and I knew that my kids and wife (and myself believe it or not)
> could really use something like this on occasion. Like when my daughter had
> worked for 3 days on a book report just to save over it on accident with a
> letter to her grandma. So hurray, yet another way for Microsoft for coming up
> with a way to further stupid proof its software for the masses (and yes this
> still includes me).
>
> Well over a year later I finally got a laptop with Vista Home Premium (as
> the retailer did not sell laptops with Ultimate without paying for an upgrade
> that was more expensive then the Anytime upgrade option) and was happy. Well
> a couple months after that (last Tuesday) I screwed up a spreadsheet as I am
> apt to do and was freaking out until I remembered about the Volume Shadow
> Copy feature. So I start looking online as how to access this feature and
> find out that it is only available in Business Editions and up. Well no big
> deal I backed up the spreadsheet to disc the month previous so all my work
> was not lost.
>
> But then I found out that actually the Home versions of Vista do have Volume
> Shadow Copy, and they even make the same "snapshots" as the Business and Up
> versions do. But you just can't access these snapshots via "previous
> versions".
>
> So now I am thinking... And I wonder why should I be dedication up to 15%
> percent of my hard drive to this if I can't access it. So the first thing I
> do is try and find out exactly how much room this is taking up on my system
> and find out that running VSSADMIN in an elevated command prompt can show me
> and I find that about 12% of my hard drive is being used by Volume Shadow
> Copy. So can I turn it off and get this back. Well yes, but then I throw out
> System Restore in the process. So that is out because I like to try things
> and explore the net, and System restore is my best friend in that regard. I
> also could go ahead and use VSSADMIN to resize the size of the volume shadow
> copy, but that reduces the number of system restores, and still leaves me
> with old copies of files that I cannot access.
>
> So is there any way I can either a access these files without upgrading, or
> if that is not possible to not have it shadow copy my files in the first
> place?