Shadow Copies for Shared Folders / Previous Versions

Shadow Copies of Shared Folders provides point-in-time copies of files that are located on shared resources, such as a file server. With Shadow Copies of Shared Folders, you can view shared files and folders as they existed at points of time in the past. You can access the server portion of Shadow Copies of Shared Folders through the Shadow Copies tab of the Local Disk Properties dialog box.

When you restore a file, the file permissions will not be changed. Permissions will remain the same as they were before the restore. When you recover a file that was accidentally deleted, the file permissions will be set to the default permissions for the directory.

Creating shadow copies is not a replacement for creating regular backups.

When storage area limits are reached, the oldest shadow copy will be deleted and cannot be retrieved. There is a limit of 64 shadow copies per volume that can be stored. When this limit is reached, the oldest shadow copy will be deleted and cannot be retrieved.

Shadow copies are read-only. You cannot edit the contents of a shadow copy.

You can only enable Shadow Copies of Shared Folders on a per-volume basis; that is, you cannot select specific shared folders and files on a volume to be copied or not copied.

The client software for Shadow Copies of Shared Folders is located on the server and must be deployed to client computers. You can access the client view of shadow copies through the Previous Versions tab of the Properties dialog box of the shared file or folder. The client software for Shadow Copies of Shared Folders is installed on the server in the \\%systemroot%\system32\clients\twclient directory