How to set up and recover a Historian™ Shadow Copy

A Shadow Copy is a backup version that mirrors the cabinet/vault you created in Historian™. You will want to have an external source to keep either your Shadow Copy or regular cabinet on—that way, if something were to happen to your computer, your external hard drive copy is still protected.

This means you can either keep your cabinet on your computer and the Shadow Copy on the external hard drive (or vice versa). If your computer does not have space to save your memories then you will want to use two external hard drives, one for the cabinet and one for the Shadow Copy. Again, we don't want your Shadow Copy to be saved in the same location as your cabinet in case the device gets lost or damaged.

You can read this article for other ways to back up your memories!

Setting Up a New Shadow Copy

1. Open your Historian media library to view your memories.
2. At the top click into the Cabinet ribbon (for Historian 4 it will be the Vault ribbon) then press the "Shadow Copy" button.
   
3. In the pop-up window click to "Start protection" as this will begin a NEW Shadow Copy backup.
   
4. Click the "Browse" button to choose where you want the Shadow Copy to back up to.
   
5. Navigate to where you want the Shadow Copy to save, single click the folder you want then click "Select Folder".
   NOTE: As mentioned, we strongly suggest having it on a separate drive than where your main Cabinet lives. This is in case something happens to one hard drive (ie. it's dropped, damaged, or lost) then you have the other to recover from.
6. You should see a message that a new folder will be created in the location you've selected, then you can click "OK" to confirm this choice. Otherwise go back to step 4 to choose another spot.
7. From here you can choose to "Update now", or close and it will update when you exit out of Historian. During the backup process do not let the computer turn off or go to sleep as it will interrupt the backup and you will need to start over.
   
8. Once the backup is complete, your Cabinet's health check will show a green checkmark!
   

Connecting an Existing Shadow Copy

These steps are for if you already started a Shadow Copy, but then needed to transfer it to another location. Such as moving computer or switching to a new external hard drive. This process uses an existing Shadow Copy folder that was once connected to your Cabinet. If you do not have an existing Shadow Copy please follow the steps above for creating a new one.

1. Open your Historian media library to view your memories.
2. At the top click into the Cabinet ribbon (for Historian 4 it will be the Vault ribbon) then press the "Shadow Copy" button.
   
3. In the pop-up window click to "Restart protection" - this allows you to continue from an existing Shadow Copy backup.
   
4. Navigate to the Shadow Copy's folder - this is usually named your cabinet name followed by "(shadow copy)", ie. "My Cabinet (shadow copy)" - single click on the main folder then click "Select Folder".
5. From here you can choose to "Update now", or close and it will update when you exit out of Historian. During the backup process do not let the computer turn off or go to sleep as it will interrupt the backup and you will need to start over.
   
6. Once the backup is complete, your Cabinet's health check will show a green checkmark!
   

Recovering a Shadow Copy

You can follow these steps if you need to rescue your memories back into Historian, like if you've lost your main Cabinet.

1. Open Historian and at the top of the Welcome page click the button to "Recover Cabinet" (for Historian 4 the button will say "Recover Vault").
   
2. The pop-up window requires a 2-step process before it will let you click OK and continue with the recover process: pick a new location for the main Cabinet to live, and choose how you are recovering the memories.
   
3. First is to pick the new Cabinet location (where the recovered memories are going to). Within the "New location for the recovered cabinet" area click the three dots to the right then browse and select the folder to recover them to.
4. Next click to "Use a shadow copy" to recover from, and browse to where the Shadow Copy is currently saved at. Make sure to select the entire Shadow Copy folder, NOT inside the folder.
   
   NOTE: If you get an error that "The selected folder does not contain a shadow copy cabinet" this means you either went too far into the folder, or this folder does not have any content to recover as a Shadow Copy - if the latter then either this is a Full/Incremental Backup or a manual Export of the cabinet. In either case you will need to follow alternative steps to be able to recover them.
5. Once both areas are properly filled in the OK button will be able to be clicked on! During the recovery process do not let the computer turn off or go to sleep as it will interrupt the recovery and you will need to start over. When finished you will have the newly recovered cabinet in the area you chose for step 3, and it will automatically back up to the original Shadow Copy you recovered from in step 4!