SynergyVSSWriter service

WSupported on Windows

NSupported in Synergy .NET

The SynergyVSSWriter service coordinates between an operating system backup provider (Volume Shadow Copy Service, more commonly known as VSS) and the synbackup utility to prevent corruption of the files being backed up (which are almost exclusively ISAM files). The purpose of SynergyVSSWriter is to automatically turn synbackup on while a system backup is in progress and turn it off when the backup is finished. Synbackup ensures that ISAM files are synchronized correctly.

SynergyVSSWriter must be run as an administrator or with elevation and has the following syntax:

synergyvsswriter [-q|-r|-rs|-x] [-v] [-h]

Options

-q

Stop the SynergyVSSWriter service.

-r

Register the SynergyVSSWriter service.

-rs

Register the SynergyVSSWriter service (if necessary) and then start it.

-x

Unregister (remove) the SynergyVSSWriter service. If the service is running, -x will first stop it.   

-v

Log all events to the event viewer.

-h

Get help by displaying a list of the SynergyVSSWriter options.   

Discussion

The default path where SynergyVSSWriter will watch for VSS events to occur is C:\ and the file specification to match is *.is*, or you can designate the path and filename specification by setting the SYN_VSS_WATCH_PATH and SYN_VSS_WATCH_FILE environment variables in the system environment. If you manually or automatically trigger a file backup in the designated path with the designated file specification, SynergyVSSWriter will be invoked and given the opportunity to run synbackup before letting the backup operation be carried out. Once the backup operation is completed, synbackup will be turned off again.

The SynergyVSSWriter service works with any VSS provider that supports SQL server backups.

To validate that SynergyVSSWriter is executing correctly, you can include the -v option as the second argument to log all events and errors to the Windows Event Viewer.