Here’s the scenario:
You’ve turned on the Volume Shadow copy feature in Windows, and told it to store the shadow copy data on the same volume you are trying to protect (because you don’t have a second volume).
One day, you delete a very large file (say a 2GB data file), and think: hey that’s OK, I’ll just restore it from my shadow copy!
So you show previous versions, see copies from the last 7 or whatever number of days, pick one of those versions and drag and drop to a folder to restore the file.
In the middle of the restore from the shadow copy, you get an error that the file is no longer there, and the entire volume shadow copy folder you were browsing no longer exists!
You click the previous versions tab for the folder and there’s no data listed!
After some digging through the system event log you find Event 25: with a description: “The shadow copies of volume D: were deleted because the shadow copy storage could not grow in time. Consider reducing the IO load on the system or choose a shadow copy storage volume that is not being shadow copied.”
Basically, that message is telling you that Windows went ahead and deleted the shadow copy.
The irony is, that the event that triggered the deletion was restoring the data from the shadow copy!!! So the act of restoring data from a shadow copy, can (as in my case) actually result in the deletion of that shadow copy!
The thing I don’t understand is why would it let the shadow copy get deleted while you’re restoring files from it?
The go-forward solution to this problem is just: buy more disk storage and put your shadow copies there.
Darren Myher's Blog 