access of windows shadow copy by rsync?

[Max Kipness]

> Is there any way to access the shadow device by the copy command and
to
> pipe the files to rsync?
> that means to "filter" the files by rsync (to copy only the necessary
> files)?
>  Michael

Sorry for the late response.

I don't know if you can pipe directly to rsync from the xp copy command,
as I don't think rsync can receive its file list from stdin.

What I've done is created a script with two file lists, standard rsync
list and an open file list. My script runs vshadow.exe creating the
volume shadow device, reads the files from 'open file list', then copies
them to a temp location. Then rsync runs against its file list which
includes the temp location. Then the script deletes everything in the
temp directory. I add to the 'open file list', files that I know most
likely will be open, like .pst files.

I've tested restoring .pst files in which they were open, and only the
changes calculated by rsync were transferred over the course of several
backups. They restored fine.

I had the thought of piping stderr from my rsync script to a separate
file, and then copying all files that were 'in use' according to rsync
via vshadow and then running rsync for a second time. If I recall
though, on windows, rsync doesn't specify which files are 'in use' and
rather uses a generic error for any file it cannot copy. I guess it
still would not hurt to try getting them through vshadow.

Max