Windows 2003 Server introduced a cool feature called “Shadow Copies of Shared Folders,” which is also available in Server 2008. In a nutshell, this feature (also known as the Volume Shadowcopy Service) lets you make periodic snapshots of a server volume so that users with Windows XP or Vista can access “previous versions” of files or folders that were stored on network shares. It’s kind of like a Recycle Bin for the network.
An interesting thing about this feature, as pointed out helpfully by one of my seminar students this past week (thank you Jason), is that it is misnamed. It turns out that shadow copy snapshots are not limited to shared folders at all, in spite of the name, and in spite of Microsoft documentation (both printed and on-line) that suggests otherwise. You can retrieve previous versions of files in unshared folders, both in Server 2003 and in Server 2008. Try it.
So it looks like we can chalk up yet another unforced error by the Microsoft Department of Naming Things. Maybe Microsoft named the feature as it did because its intended application is for users to recover previous versions of files residing on network shares. Still, it’s useful to know that if you need to retrieve a deleted or overwritten file anywhere on a server volume, you can do so, once the shadow copy service has been enabled (and depending on how much disk space you allocate to the feature, which in turn governs how many snapshots will be stored).
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