I am sure that GP Software has assigned several of their staff of elite programmers to look into including support for VSS and will incorporate it in the near future. Right Jon? ... Jon? Well, maybe a feature request.
The original concept of Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) was to allow a file server (W2003) to take "snapshots" of a volume on a scheduled basis for archiving user data. That way, users could restore data files from a snapshot of their choice when they screwed them up. Note, the snapshot is on a per volume, not folder, level. The snapshots are differential so you don't wind up with a mirror of the volume. If you bring up the properties for a volume in the server (2003 and 2008), there is a tab for Shadow Copies and you can enable a volume and set the schedule for snapshots. There is also a button to create one now.
The way the recovery works, is similar to what you see in Vista where you right click on a file and you see a choice for "restore previous version". Alas, If you delete your file by mistake, there is nothing left to click on. You have to create another one in the same folder with the same name and then you can recover it.
As you point out, most of the programs that make use of VSS are backup programs, including system backup itself. Up until Vista, most of these kept backups in proprietary formatted files so you could only get copies of stuff by doing restore. Perhaps you just wanted to put a copy of a few files or folders somewhere where you could reference them. In that case ntbackup was not handy. Each database seems to have its own backup program. It looks like Vista uses Zip files, Server 2008 has a new backup system. You have to install it as a separate feature. I have not looked into it, we are not using server 2008 at the moment.
In Vista, and Server 2008, restore points are VSS snapshots and can be accessed to some extent via vssadmin. In fact, vssadmin in Server 2003 and 2008 will allow you to create a snapshot of a volume, use it to copy stuff, and then delete the (latest) snapshot. Naturally, snapshots are read only. DO, is the only file manager that I have used that will allow pasting the snapshot volume ID into the location field and accessing it, copying any file or folder that you have permission to access. The other file manager wannabes may do this, but I don't have any of them to try. I have posted a procedure to do this, using DO, a couple of times. It is somewhat labor intensive. As you point out, the permissions on the snapshot are the same as the volume itself. Note that snapshots can be on any volume, including the system volume. The snapshot ID looks like: \?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy1
You may want to use "vssadmin list shadowstorage" to see how much space is reserved for snapshots and "vssadmin resize shadowstorage" to manage it. My laptop came with unlimited shadow storage and it had grown to about 12GB before I realized it.
I have my own program that will allow me to copy open files, like SQL Database files, registry files and other System or open files using a VSS snapshot. In fact, you can create a snapshot of a volume and mount it as a drive letter or a directory (but not in XP). I can copy the complete system partition and then, with some modifications to the copy's registry, make it bootable. DO can be used to send the program a list of folders/files to be copied.
If you can get your hands on VShadow from the SDK, it will allow creation and manipulation of snapshots and includes the source code (C++). The VSS API's are a little grotesque and documentation was pretty sparse until the Vista upgrade to the SDK. The creation of a snapshot involves about 9 or 10 steps, some of which are asynchronous, and it includes notifying Writers (what are Writers? from the command line, try "vssadmin list writers" to see them).
Lou