How to use Volume Shadows Copy and Robocopy on Win7?

robocopy volume-shadow-service
Franck picture Franck · Feb 2, 2012 · Viewed 11.3k times · Source

I’d like to backup my system with Robocopy and Powersell but Robocopy is not able to copy opened files. Volume Shadows Copy seems a solution but I don’t find any clear and simple explanation how to use it.

Do you have any idea?

I’m running on Windows 7 x64 Enterprise. Thanks for your help. Franck

Answer

Nick Garvey picture Nick Garvey · Jul 20, 2012

In order to perform a VSS snapshot on Windows 7, you can simply do a "System Restore". After, open an administrator console, type vssadmin list shadows. You are looking for the "Shadow Copy Volume" line in the most recent snapshot. Copy this, and do mountvol X: YOUR_VSS_PATH, and your VSS snap will be mounted on X:. After that, run robocopy on X: and you should be good to go.

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