What is the Volume Shadow Copy Service?
The Volume Shadow Copy Service is more of a convenience feature rather than an alternative to backups. The reason for this is that shadow copy data resides on the same volume as the original data. Therefore, if the volume became corrupt then there would be no way or restoring shadow copy backups. You would have to rely on a traditional tape backup instead. Another limitation to shadow copy backups is that they only work if Windows is functional. For example, if Windows crashed due to a corrupt registry then Windows would not be functional. You would therefore have to restore Windows from a traditional backup rather than from a shadow copy backup. Still another limitation is that shadow copy backups are designed to restore one file at a time. Because of this, shadow copy backups are not suitable for restoring large numbers of files. These limitations do not mean that shadow copy backups are useless though. On the contrary. If a user needs to revert to a previous version of a file then a
