Skip to main content

Forcing a Windows 7 client to create a Shadow Copy

Windows 7 has the ability to support Previous Versions lust like Windows XP and Vista did on a share hosted on a 2003 or 2008 server.  The difference is that the shadow copy can now be a local drive.  Thanks to a little help from Thomas Lee and a posting on the Win32_ShadowCopy from MSDN, you can force a Windows 7 to create a shadow copy.  The actual lines of PowerShell code are below.

# get static method
$class=[WMICLASS]"root\cimv2:win32_shadowcopy"
# create a new shadow copy
"Creating a new shadow copy"
$class.create("C:\", "ClientAccessible")

You can attempt to run this remotely by using PowerShell V2 remoting capability

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hmm... this is the response my system (Win7 Ultimate 64-bit) spat back when I ran your script:

Exception calling "Create" : "Initialization failure "
At \temp\force-vss.ps1:5 char:14
+ $class.create <<<< ("C:\", "ClientAccessible")
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodInvocationException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : WMIMethodException

Is there an alternative to "win32_shadowcopy" for 64-bit systems?
You are correct. Thank you for catching that. This code was written on an X86 machine.

I did a bit of research on MSDN. Take a look at the bottom of this page. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa394428(v=vs.85).aspx

You will see that someone else has commented on this issue. I'll take another look at this next week and see if I can find anything that will work on an X64.
Here is something that is interesting. Take a look at the comments from John Homer. It looks like he has a script that might help you out.

http://serverfault.com/questions/119120/how-to-use-a-volume-shadow-copy-to-make-backups

Popular posts from this blog

Adding a Comment to a GPO with PowerShell

As I'm writing this article, I'm also writing a customization for a PowerShell course I'm teaching next week in Phoenix.  This customization deals with Group Policy and PowerShell.  For those of you who attend my classes may already know this, but I sit their and try to ask the questions to myself that others may ask as I present the material.  I finished up my customization a few hours ago and then I realized that I did not add in how to put a comment on a GPO.  This is a feature that many Group Policy Administrators may not be aware of. This past summer I attended a presentation at TechEd on Group Policy.  One organization in the crowd had over 5,000 Group Policies.  In an environment like that, the comment section can be priceless.  I always like to write in the comment section why I created the policy so I know its purpose next week after I've completed 50 other tasks and can't remember what I did 5 minutes ago. In the Group Policy module for PowerShell V3, th

Return duplicate values from a collection with PowerShell

If you have a collection of objects and you want to remove any duplicate items, it is fairly simple. # Create a collection with duplicate values $Set1 = 1 , 1 , 2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 1 , 2   # Remove the duplicate values. $Set1 | Select-Object -Unique 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 What if you want only the duplicate values and nothing else? # Create a collection with duplicate values $Set1 = 1 , 1 , 2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 1 , 2   #Create a second collection with duplicate values removed. $Set2 = $Set1 | Select-Object -Unique   # Return only the duplicate values. ( Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $Set2 -DifferenceObject $Set1 ) . InputObject | Select-Object – Unique 1 2 This works with objects as well as numbers.  The first command creates a collection with 2 duplicates of both 1 and 2.   The second command creates another collection with the duplicates filtered out.  The Compare-Object cmdlet will first find items that are diffe

How to list all the AD LDS instances on a server

AD LDS allows you to provide directory services to applications that are free of the confines of Active Directory.  To list all the AD LDS instances on a server, follow this procedure: Log into the server in question Open a command prompt. Type dsdbutil and press Enter Type List Instances and press Enter . You will receive a list of the instance name, both the LDAP and SSL port numbers, the location of the database, and its status.