How to use Volume Shadows Copy and Robocopy on Win7?

Question

I’d like to backup my system with Robocopy and Powersell but Robocopy is not able to copy opened files. Volume Shadows Copy seems a solution but I don’t find any clear and simple explanation how to use it.

Do you have any idea?

I’m running on Windows 7 x64 Enterprise. Thanks for your help. Franck

Answer 1

You can mount the VSS shadow using mklink command. This Works in Servers and Workstations.

mklink is a native tool.

For example:

mklink /D C:\shadow_volume_1 \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy1\

More information can be found here: http://forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mount_shadow_volumes_on_disk_images

Answer 2

In order to perform a VSS snapshot on Windows 7, you can simply do a "System Restore". After, open an administrator console, type vssadmin list shadows. You are looking for the "Shadow Copy Volume" line in the most recent snapshot. Copy this, and do mountvol X: YOUR_VSS_PATH, and your VSS snap will be mounted on X:. After that, run robocopy on X: and you should be good to go.