How ShadowSpawn VSS works?

[Daniel English]

Hi Craig Andera,

Thank you for developing this fantastic tool.

I am going to copy 2.5 million files (total 1.4TB) in a file server to an external hard disk.

The current files are stored in the E drive which has 3TB in total (mapped from a SAN storage), and now has 1.28TB remaining space.

My server's C drive has only 59.1GB free out of 97.5GB.

If I use shadowspawn to carry out the operation, would the space in the C drive enough to support the operation?

Indeed, how does shadowspawn's VSS work?

When shadowspawn shadow copies a source and make it as Z drive, for example, where does the Z drive's space come from?

Thank you so much!

[Craig Andera]

VSS is part of Windows - I didn't write it. ShadowSpawn just makes use
of it. It's intended to support backup tools.

My understanding is that VSS doesn't copy anything. It just marks the
volume as snapshotted during the duration of the operations. Then, if
any files get written, only the changed blocks are saved. So it's
possible to run a backup on a completely full volume and not run out
of space, assuming that you're copying the data somewhere that *does*
have space.

Good luck!

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[Daniel English]

Thank you for your reply!

I will try to see if it works, thanks so much!