Windows 7 Cannot Access Shadow Copies in SBS 2003
[Today's post comes to us courtesy of John Bay, Richard Pulliam and Damian Leibaschoff]
When you connect to a share hosted on SBS 2003 from a Windows 7 client joined to the domain and you select “Restore previous versions” or the “Previous Versions” tab under properties of the share/folder, you get a view that shows snapshots with the incorrect time, with share names missing and that cannot be restored. if you open the contents of the snapshot you notice that you are actually viewing the CURRENT contents of the network share and NOT the stored contents of the shadow copy snapshot that is stored on the server.
This is the experience when opening the Previous Versions of a share:
And this is a sample when opening the properties of a folder inside the network share:
As mentioned before, Copy and Restore do not work as expected. Furthermore, opening the contents, shows a view of the current content.
Resolution
To correct this issue, you have to remove the following registry value from your SBS 2003 server:
Before editing the registry make sure you have a working system state backup of the server.
- On your SBS 2003 server, open REGEDIT and navigate to the following location:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\Parameters - Right click on parameters and select Export.
- Once the export is completed, find the entry for DisableDownLevelTimewarp, select it and then delete it.
After deleting the mentioned key, re-test accessing the Previous Versions from your Windows 7 client. You should see the expected functionality of being able to access the existing shadow copy snapshots.
If you have XP clients, you need to make sure they have Service Pack 3 installed.
Comments
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
@BV Sp2 should work, but we did our testing with the latest version (XP SP3). Regards, SBS BloggersAnonymous
January 01, 2003
We recommended to delete the value versus changing to 1 just to achieve parity to a default installation where the registry entry will not exist by default, as mentioned before, the results are the same. Regards, SBS BloggersAnonymous
October 21, 2009
Is there any other workaround? Have not loaded SP3 on my network PC's and plan to add Win 7 soon.Anonymous
October 22, 2009
For anyone curious, the historic meaning of it (also shows that setting it to 1 would work): "Set the value of the DisableDownLevelTimewarp registry key to 0 (zero) to enable Shadow Copies for Shared Folders from clients running Windows 2000. Set the value of the DisableDownLevelTimewarp registry key to 1 (one), the default, to disable Shadow Copies for Shared Folders from clients running Windows 2000."Anonymous
October 24, 2009
FYI - This problem is not isolated to SBS2003; I found the exact same issue with Windows Server 2003 Standard SP2. Rick is exactly correct, you can simply set the value of DisableDownLevelTimewarp to 1(one) to resolve the issue; you don't have to delete the key.