Performing VSS snapshot outside of Veeam

[zoltank]

Is there some way to perform a VSS complaint snapshot outside of Veeam? I'd like to be able to do this especially when working on our SQL servers to ensure I can rollback the snapshot to a viable database.

[Vitaliy S.]

You can use SQL Server Management Studio built-in capabilities to backup your SQL Server databases. BTW, can you please clarify why would you like to do that?

[zoltank]

Sorry to bring this thread up again, but being able to perform a VSS snapshot would be useful if I'm applying update, performing an upgrade, or just reconfiguring a server. Having it be VSS compliant would help insure that if I need to roll the snapshot back I'm not going to hurt anything.

[Vitaliy S.]

You can run a VSS snapshot on the required volume via Windows tools as well. If you want to stage an upgrade, I would suggest using virtual labs and on-demand sandboxes. Lots of our existing customers are using this for the exact same reasons as you want to have a VSS snapshot. With SureBackup jobs you can spin up the production VM, test the upgrade or reconfigure something, then make sure that everything is working properly and finally proceed with the same changes on production VMs.