This is a bit of a showstopper

[Sackboy]

See post to Peter; it ain't rubbish.

They will next say it's malware.
Then a defective HD.
Then a reinstall.

All users should prepare for the reinstall.

 

[Richie Hardwick]

From Diskeeper (inside the running program):

"It is important to be aware that when VSS is enabled on a volume
with a cluster size smaller than 16 KB, VSS will see file
movement done by the defragmentation process as "changed data"
and take a point-in-time snapshot, even though only the location
of the data has changed. Unnecessary snapshots will cause the
VSS storage area to increases in size, possibly resulting in
earlier VSS snapshots being purged.

Diskeeper provides special defragmentation methods to allow you
to defragment these VSS enabled volumes, yet minimize the
possibility that older VSS snapshots will be purged.

When the VSS defragmentation option is enabled, Diskeeper uses
proprietary defragmentation engines to help reduce the chance of
the defragmentation operation causing new VSS snapshots from
being created, thus potentially preventing older snapshots from
being purged. In order to do this, the VSS defragmentation
engines use more conservative file movement algorithms, which
can result in slightly less thorough defragmentation of the volume"

Richie Hardwick

 

[DrTeeth]

From Diskeeper (inside the running program):

Thanks for that Richie. The following is an official response from
Raxco that I have been asked to post on their behalf as they are
having issues posting here.

"The Vista system restore does use shadow copy so it is affected by
this VSS issue.

Microsoft has not updated the article but Raxco has confirmed that
they deal with this quite a lot and changing the cluster size to 16K
has resolved this each time. This applies to any Windows OS running
VSS, including Vista.

Unless a drive has been formatted with a cluster size that is a
multiple of 16k, VSS detects defrag activity as changes to the drive
and can purge shadow copies. The problem is that the default cluster
size on format is 4k. If the cluster size is 16k or greater, then VSS
can "handle" defrag activity and is less likely to purge shadow
copies.

PerfectDisk provides an option to run in VSS compatible mode by
default which will attempt to limit the file movements but this may
not be enough. You may get better results running the defragmentation
only mode than SmartPlacement as it performs less file movements."
--

Cheers,

DrT

** Stress - the condition brought about by having to
** resist the temptation to beat the living daylights
** out of someone who richly deserves it.