VSS best practice

[Gordon Price]

A question for people using VV in a Windows Server 2003 environment.
Assuming you are using Volume Shadow Copy with a week or two of shadows available to users, do you then dispense with the archive feature in VV and let VSS be your only version recovery option? Or do you continue to archive with VV as a second layer of version recovery? Also, do you configure VV to replace newer destination with older source so that an older version recovered from VSS will overwrite the "newer" version on the mirror?
I have the hard drive space for VV archives, but most of my VV errors seem to be related to either archive cleanup or "older source" issues. I am thinking about just using VSS for version recovery, and letting VV just make a mirror every day. Currently I don't delete files from the mirror until Friday, but again, with VSS allowing for deleted file recovery, I might be able to further simplify my VV process.

Thanks for any insight.

Gordon

[Guest]

I don't pretend to know all the ramifications, I had a very serious data loss due to either my misunderstanding of VV Pro 2, or its limitations.[read: expensive! in the $$$thousands to rebuild, and not done yet! And the boss has vowed to never forgive me--damn near lost the job]

Ergo: I make no efforts to archive as that seemed to cause even more problems. I now make seven backups of the mission critical files, going to folders:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
etc.

Every morning at 3 am the VSS backs to the correct folder. The following week, on the appropriate day, a new target update.

Right or wrong, that's my method.