- Adi Oltean has posted a really cool method to assign a drive letter or directory to a shadow copy. This will allow you to access files that are otherwise exclusively opened by an application. Please note, this will only work on Windows Server 2003 and not in XP because it does not have shadow copy. The ability to do this is extremely useful! This might even let me backup SQL Server's data files without any external tools or shutting down SQL Server.