This chapter describes the minicopy feature of Volume Shadowing for OpenVMS introduced in OpenVMS Version 7.3. Minicopy and its enabling technology, bitmaps, are fully implemented on OpenVMS Integrity and OpenVMS Alpha systems. In an OpenVMS Alpha Cluster system , only one Alpha system is required in order to use minicopy.

The primary purpose of minicopy is to reduce the time it takes to return a shadow set member to the shadow set. The shadow set member is typically removed for the purpose of backing up the data and is then returned to membership in the shadow set.