Shadow Copies for a Single Folder

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Shadow Copies for a Single Folder (Windows servers/clients)

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    It has always irritated me that Shadow Copies is enabled for an entire Volume, as I would like to use it on 1 or 2 folders only.

    One solution I’ve come up with is to take advantage of creating a Volume inside an empty folder.

    I have tested this on Windows Servers 2008 R2 and 2012.

    This is how on Windows Server 2012 (very similar on 2008 R2):

    1. Open up Computer Management and select Disk Management under Storage.
    2. Right-click the Volume in which you’d like a folder with Shadow Copies.
    3. Click Shrink Volume.
    4. Select an amount to shrink that’s big enough for your folder and small enough to leave enough for the original Volume.
    5. Click Shrink.
    6. Right-click the new unallocated space and select New Simple Volume.
    7. Click Next twice.
    8. Select Mount in the following empty NTFS folder and click Browse.
    9. Select the Volume in which you’d like to place the folder.
    10. Click New Folder and give it a name.
    11. click OK and Next.
    12. Name the Volume Label the same as your Folder name (makes it easier to administer) and click Next.
    13. Click Finish.
    14. In order for the restoring of previous files to work, you will need to assign this new volume a drive mapping as well.
    15. Right-click the new Volume and click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
    16. Click Add and choose a drive letter and click OK.
    17. Close the Computer Management.
    18. You can now share the folder on the original Volume.
    19. Right-click the drive letter you chose for the folder Volume and select Configure Shadow Copies.
    20. Enable Shadow Copies for the drive letter found in the list of volume.
    21. Configure the settings as you like.
    22. One important note is that in order to restore previous versions of a file, you need to do it from the drive letter; it doesn’t work from the folder.

    Hope this will help those who’ve been looking for a way to do this.

    You could of course just skip some of the steps above and create a « normal » volume with a drive letter and then just share that and enable Shadow Copies, but that’s completely up to you. 🙂

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