Each writer is application-specific and has 60 seconds to establish a backup-safe state before providers start snapshot creation.

If the Volume Shadow Copy service does not receive acknowledgement of success from the corresponding writers within this time-frame, it fails the operation.

It can only create temporary snapshots, used for accessing stable on-disk version of files that are opened for editing (and therefore locked).

In Windows Server 2003, VSS is used to create incremental periodic snapshots of data of changed files over time.

[13] Windows XP[14] and later include a command line utility called vssadmin that can list, create or delete volume shadow copies and list installed shadow copy writers and providers.

[15] Microsoft updated a number of Windows components to make use of Shadow Copy.

Finally, Windows Server 2008 introduces the diskshadow utility which exposes VSS functionality through 20 different commands.

The Home Editions of Vista lack the "Previous Versions" feature, even though the Volume Snapshot Service is included and running.

[26] Windows 7 also adds native support through a GUI to configure the storage used by volume-shadow copies.

While supporting persistent shadow copies, Windows 8 lacks the GUI portion necessary to browse them; therefore the ability to browse, search or recover older versions of files via the Previous Versions tab of the Properties dialog of files was removed for local volumes.

[29] Samba on Linux is capable of providing Shadow Copy Service on an LVM-backed storage or with an underlying ZFS or btrfs.

This happens because the older operating system does not understand the newer format of persistent shadow copies.