Chances are a great deal of your important data is generated or managed by a VSS application. You might have emails managed by an Exchange server or your customer accounts indexed by a SQL database. Knowing which applications use VSS will tell you the best way to back them up.
If an app uses VSS it can be backed up while it is running by our VSS Backup tool. We have specialist backups for SQL, Hyper-V and Exchange because these are the most popular VSS apps but any program with VSS can be backed up while open and running.
To check if you are running a VSS app, open the Command Prompt and run the command vssadmin list writers. This will tick over for a second or two and then spit out a list of all the VSS applications that are running on your machine at the time.
Read over the list to see if your app is there. If it is listed then you can back it up. If it isn’t on the list, check with the software manufacturer if the program uses VSS. If it doesn’t then you’ll have to stop the program before running a backup on it.
Learn more over at Microsoft.
