What's New in VSS in Windows Server 2003 SP1

The following list indicates additions and changes to the Volume Shadow Copy Service interface in Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1):

Auto-recovery

Auto-recovery allows writers a time to update components in a shadow copy before the shadow copy is permanently changed to read-only. For example, a database may need to rollback any incomplete transactions for all shadow copies (the database writer would set the VSS_CF_BACKUP_RECOVERY flag for the database components). Auto-recovery initiated by the requester allows both fine-grained restore (for example restoring one table in a database or one folder on a mail server), or the rollback to support data mining to perform analysis that would be too slow for a production server (the requester would add VSS_VOLSNAP_ATTR_ROLLBACK_RECOVERY to the shadow copy context.) Auto-recovery is not compatible with transportable shadow copies, but the same functionality is supported by using Fast Recovery Using Transportable Shadow Copied Volumes.

The following programming elements have changes to support auto-recovery:

Class methods

• CVssWriter::GetSnapshotDeviceName
• CVssWriter::OnPostSnapshot

Enumerations

• VSS_COMPONENT_FLAGS
• _VSS_VOLUME_SNAPSHOT_ATTRIBUTES

Interface methods

• IVssProviderCreateSnapshotSet::PreFinalCommitSnapshots
• IVssProviderCreateSnapshotSet::PostFinalCommitSnapshots

Full Support for Transportable Shadow Copies

Transportable shadow copies are supported in all editions of Windows Server 2003 with SP1. For more information, see Importing Transportable Shadow Copied Volumes.

Fast Recovery Using Transportable Shadow Copied Volumes

Fast Recovery Using Transportable Shadow Copied Volumes

Shadow copy storage area management

IVssSnapshotMgmt2