Shadow Copy

Have you ever accidentally saved over a file you were working on? Accidental file deletion or modification is a common cause of data loss. Windows Vista includes a useful innovation to help you protect your data: Shadow Copy. Available in the Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise editions of Windows Vista, this feature automatically creates point-in-time copies of files as you work, so you can quickly and easily retrieve versions of a document you may have accidentally deleted. Shadow copy is automatically turned on in Windows Vista and creates copies on a scheduled basis of files that have changed. Since only incremental changes are saved, minimal disk space is used for shadow copies.

Methods for Creating Shadow Copies

There are two methods for creating shadow copies: making either a complete copy (a full copy or clone) or copying only the changes to the volume (a differential copy or copy-on-write). Each method results in two data images — the original volume and the shadow copy volume. The functional difference between the two is that the original volume maintains full read/write capabilities, whereas the shadow copy volume is read-only. This read-only status ensures that the shadow copy volume remains a point-in-time copy until its status is changed by the administrator for a specific purpose.

Clone (Full Copy/Split Mirror):

A clone is a full copy of the original data on a volume. You can create a clone through either software or hardware mirroring. Clones remain synchronized until the mirror connection is broken for the shadow copy. From this point forward, the source data and the shadow copy volume are independent. The original volume continues to take application changes, while the shadow copy volume remains an exact read-only copy of the original data at the time of the break.

Hardware vendors offer different hardware-based implementations (sometimes called split mirrors, snapshot mirrors, or clones) for creating identical images of volumes that can be used for online backup, application development, and testing.

Copy-on-Write (Differential Copy)

The copy-on-write method creates shadow copies that are differential rather than full copies of the original data. Like the clone method of creating shadow copies, the copy-on-write method can produce shadow copies using either software or hardware solutions. This method makes a copy of the original data before it is overwritten with new changes, as shown in the following table. When a change to the original volume occurs, but before it is written to disk, the block about to be modified is read and then written to a “differences area”, which preserves a copy of the data block before it is overwritten with the change. Using the blocks in the differences area and unchanged blocks in the original volume, a shadow copy can be logically constructed that represents the shadow copy at the point in time in which it was created.

Volume Shadow Copy Service Architecture

The following diagram and table describe how the Volume Shadow Copy Service coordinates with various components to create a shadow copy of a volume.

Volume Shadow Copy Service Architecture Diagram

How Shadow Copies Are Created

The various roles of the requestor, writer and provider are put into context in this section, which lists the steps that need to be taken to create a shadow copy. Overall coordination of the requestor, writer, and provider is controlled by the Volume Shadow Copy Service, as shown in the following diagram.

Shadow Copy Creation Process

The requestor asks the Volume Shadow Copy Service to enumerate the writers, gather the writer metadata, and prepare for shadow copy creation.

The writer creates an XML description of the backup components to the Volume Shadow Copy Service, and defines the restore method. The Volume Shadow Copy Service notifies the application-specific writer to prepare its data for making a shadow copy.

The writer prepares the data in whatever way is appropriate, such as completing all open transactions, rolling transaction logs, and flushing caches. When the data is prepared for shadow copy creation, the writer notifies the Volume Shadow Copy Service.

The Volume Shadow Copy Service initiates the “commit” shadow copy phase.

The Volume Shadow Copy Service tells the writers to quiesce their data and temporarily freeze requestor (application) I/O write requests (I/O read requests are still possible) for the several seconds required to create the shadow copy of the volume or volumes. The application freeze is not allowed to take longer than 60 seconds. The Volume Shadow Copy Service flushes the file system buffer and then freezes the file system, which ensures that file system metadata is written and that the data is written in a consistent order.

The Volume Shadow Copy Service tells the provider to create the shadow copy (a maximum of 10 seconds).

The Volume Shadow Copy Service thaws the file system. After the shadow copy is created, the Volume Shadow Copy Service releases the writers from their temporary inactive phase and all queued write I/Os are completed.

The Volume Shadow Copy Service queries the writers to confirm that write I/Os were successfully held during shadow copy creation.

If the writes were not successfully held (meaning that the shadow copy data is potentially inconsistent), the shadow copy is deleted and the requestor is notified.

The requestor can retry the process (go back to step 1) or notify the administrator to retry at a later time.

If the copy is successful, the Volume Shadow Copy Service gives the location information for the shadow copy back to the requestor.

Intro

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