Shadow copies using too much space

[acl03]

I am running a fileserver with Windows 2008 R2. The same problem existed on my old 2003 box.

We have a volume with about 3TB of used space. We also have Diskeeper installed, with the "shadow copy" option turned on.

I dedicated 1 TB of space to my shadow copy volume. After only 1 day's changes, there are only 300 GB free on this drive. I have disabled Diskeeper defrag to see if the next couple days yield smaller shadow copies. We only get about 20 GB a day of changes on the server, and lots of those are creation of new files, which shouldn't take up any shadow copy space (right?).

What could be the cause of this? To me, VSS is like a black box - I can't get any good description of how it works, in particular, what types of file activity causes lots of space usage on the volume where snapshots are stored.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Thanks,
Andrew

Hard work often pays off over time, but procrastination pays off right now!

 

[kmcferrin]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb968832(v=VS.85).aspx

That's a good overview of how VSS works. Use the links on the left-hand side to browse sub-categories of the topic.

My guess is that when Diskeeper is doing it's defrag that VSS is tagging the files as having changed, causing more copies to be taken than necessary.

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Windows 7
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Server Administrator
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator
MCITP:Virtualization Administrator 2008 R2
Certified Quest vWorkspace Administrator

 

[acl03]

Maybe - I know Diskeeper has a special less-effective defrag option that is designed not to cause extra snapshots, but I've disabled diskeeper in the meantime to see if it isn't working as advertised. Thanks for the link.

Thanks,
Andrew

Hard work often pays off over time, but procrastination pays off right now!