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I have a 2008R2 and 2012 servers that has been in production for quite some time, running smoothly - I have never paid attention to VSS.

Various volumes with Shares are setup to capture shadows copies - every hours every day. The storage area is set to unlimited (300GB). VSS captures shadow copies accordingly as per schedule.

The problem I'm having is that the Shadow Copies are not growing to use all of the 'Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space'. The 'Used Shadow Copy Storage space' is at 10.962GB - I've seen it go a bit higher, but never over 12GB. As a result, I'm not capturing as many prior versions of the volume as I would like.

There are no errors in the System log. Running 'vssadmin list shadowstorage' confirms that max size is 27GB. Running 'vssadmin list writers' shows all states as 'stable' and no errors. Running 'vssadmin list providers' shows there is only one provider (Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider, version 1.0.0.7).

I'd appreciate any ideas about how to narrow down why the 'Maximum Size' setting is seemingly being ignored. Fixing this would increase the number of shadow copies I have for this volume.

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  • Have you confirmed that the oldest shadow copies are dropped when the newest copy is created? How old is the oldest available shadow?
    – BlueCompute
    Oct 30, 2014 at 10:37
  • it does indeed seems to be trimming from the oldest. it looks like I can only have 3-4 days of shadow copies. but again, evenlog says nothing about truncation.
    – KitKatNeko
    Oct 30, 2014 at 13:08
  • to be exact it seems I can only store 64 shadows.
    – KitKatNeko
    Nov 3, 2014 at 17:01

1 Answer 1

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I am not sure if this applies for 2012 as MSFT documentation is almost non-existent. There is a soft limit to the number of shadows one can take: 64. This could be increased to 512, but seems to pose a problem when trying to access them.

http://tobias-tobin.blogspot.ca/2011/06/how-to-view-more-than-64-snapshots-on.html

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