To Activate VSS in FRP Version 7.5 or later.
Released Mar. 31st. 2018 and newer only
Older versions of FRP must be upgraded to get this feature. To upgrade contact support@filereplicationpro.com
Required Setup:
- Add/ or set if the properties already exist, the following two properties in /FilerReplicationPro/etc/s2s.properties on all machines (instructions below)
- s2s.vss.mount.folder=C:\\FRPTEMP (your folder** must exist and be writable by an admin account) if you create this folder as a subfolder you must use two \\ between each level as in this example E:\\VSS\\FRP\\test
- s2s.vss.flag=true
- Enter services.msc and set up the FRP replication service to run FRP as admin user if the files are domain file it must be an Admin Domain Account to transfer attributes and ownership. (This is must otherwise vss will fail to create shadow copies) Some users will want to consider creating a special Admin account that gives the rights to FRP it needs while restricting it's access to other areas of the file-system.
- Save and repeat on all of the other servers all must be FRP version 7.5 or higher.
- Restart the jobs
**Why the size of the VSS temp folder is not a real concern.
The snapshot provided by the Volume Shadow Copy Service is NOT a real parallel copy of the volume.
I highly recommend reading the link below. While it is specific to backing up MS Exchange (while alive), it gives a very clear explanation of how VSS works:
The snapshot is a way of saving the state of the system (in the case of vss, it is the state of a full volume) at a point in time where all data is consistent.
Actually, the volume is not copied aside.
The snapshot is just defined, and then as blocks get modified, a "copy on write" technology (COW)
is used to set aside the pre-modifies contents of the block, thus maintaining the snapshot state.
By "chaining" unmodified blocks with the set aside blocks we can reconstruct or present a "view" of the original snapshot data
The amount of extra data that will be required is related to the amount of blocks that will be modifies over time.
If we only need the snapshot taken before we start replicating (in batch) and then we do the copy from tje snapshot and when we finish we dont need the snapshot any more, we will not need much extra space for the snapshot.
We need to consider what we do for real time.
Please take a look for additional definitions of the terminology at:
End of Article.
Other Links