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Using a VSS Requestor with Windows SharePoint Services

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This topic describes the steps you need to perform to back up and restore Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 data using your VSS Requestor.

To back up and restore data by using your Requestor

  1. Manually start the Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer service. Open Administrative Tools, navigate to and open Services and start the service called Volume Shadow Copy.

  2. Register the Writer in the Windows registry by running the STSADM -o registerwsswriter command from a system console. The executable is located in the <%Program Files %>\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Bin\ directory.

  3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 on all Windows SharePoint Services servers.

  4. Use your Requestor to back up and restore data. You can either use your requestor (as outlined in the Volume Shadow Copy Service Overview) or the BETest test utility (available in the VSS SDK) to back up or restore from Windows SharePoint Services.

Security for Running VSS

VSS has special requirements for the accounts running the writers on all targeted server instances for backup and restore

  • The running account must have permission to call into VSS. By default, VSS requires a VSS writer to be a member of the Administrator or Backup Operators group on the targeted server instance. You can configure a registry key to allow other accounts to have access to VSS.

  • The account must have permission to issue BACKUP DATABASE and RESTORE DATABASE commands against the database servers.

  • The account must have permission to open up VDI against SQL Server, which requires the client to be a member of the SQL Server sysadmin group.

  • The account must be able to perform queries against the sys.master_files catalog view in the master database on the SQL server.

Also, to be hosted by the Timer service (owstimer.exe), the writer service must run under the admin app pool account, which is the "Network Service" account in a basic installation of Windows SharePoint Services.

Note   It is very unlikely that this account will be a local machine admin account, which differs from the requirement for VSS where the processing account must be running as local system.