SynergyVSSWriter service

WTSupported in traditional Synergy on Windows

WNSupported in Synergy .NET on Windows

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.

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 using the SYN_VSS_WATCH_PATH and SYN_VSS_WATCH_FILE environment variables, which must have been set 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, events and errors are logged to the Windows Event Viewer.

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

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

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.