How to safely change the storage area for VSS shadow copies?
Hi all I have an Exchange server with a VSS shadow copy allocation that is consuming a large amount of space on one of the volumes. This volume also hosts the Exchange database. I would like to change the storage area to another volume that has more space. When I try to change the storage from F: to G: I get the following error: Error 0x8004231d: The specified shadow copy storage is in use and can't be deleted. No backups are running. Any thoughts on how to work around this (without rebooting)? Can I simply reduce the allocation from "Unlimited" to, say, 300MB and then try again? Alexei
June 30th, 2010 12:28am

i am not aware of a way to simply "move" the vss storage to another volume. you can however add additional storage on another volume, possibly then remove the old. however, i would test that with a test setup before trying it ona production system. see the documentatio for vssadmin add shadowstorage (http://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/cc754968(WS.10).aspx)
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June 30th, 2010 2:27am

From my testing I see that if I reduce the storage allocation to the minimum (320MB) it deletes all of the existing shadow copies on disk hosting the original storage area. Once this happens I can then change the storage area for the shadow copies to my other volume. This method works, but feels klunky. I wonder if there is a better method? Alexei
June 30th, 2010 4:43am

Hi, You can refer to the following information: Move the volume shadow copy storage area to a different volume To move the volume shadow copy storage area to a different volume: Caution: When you change the location of the shadow copy storage area, all previous shadow copies are deleted. Event ID 12297 — VSS Shadow Copy Creation and Storage Space Availability http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd364933(WS.10).aspx Best Regards, Vincent Hu
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July 2nd, 2010 12:22pm

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