What is System State Backups or Shadow Copy Components

This is a Two Stage Process 

1) The Shadow copy components is first 'exported' to some files on the disk.

2)  Then these files are backed up

Reason :- 

The Shadow copy components is like a running database , We cannot backup a running database just by coping the files. So, the data in the Shadow Copy Component is 'exported' to flat files in a form that it can be restored from. This flat file are created on the disk , then writes these flat files to tape.