Windows 7 Shadow Copy - What, Why, When, Who cares?

[dkperez]

I"m getting an error in the event log:
The shadow copies of volume C: were aborted because the shadow copy storage could not grow due to a user imposed limit.

Which prompts me to ask:

What is this shadow copy thing?
Why do I want it? What does it do FOR me?

I rummaged about the Internet but although I can find a lot of things that talk about backup and restore,
I'm not finding much about what the thing is, why it's giving me this error, etc.....

So, what's up with this?

 

[cybercore]

Shadow Copy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Introduction to Shadow Copies of Shared Folders

 

[philgman]

disable shadow copy-not recommended.

Open the System Control Panel and click System Protection in the menu on the left. In the resulting dialog, check the drives you want to shadow; the more you check, the more drive space the feature will use. The best option is to shadow drives containing your data files and anything else you can't replace by another method.

 

[dkperez]

Yeah, I finally figured out the shadow copy thing is doing the system restore points and such. Once I increased the system partition from 39 to 60+ GB it stopped complaining....

 

[reghakr]

philgman is correct.

If you disable shadow Copy,. System Restore will not work.