You are making a deep copy any time you copy a vector. But if your vector is a vector of pointers you are getting the copy of pointers, not the values are pointed to
For example:
std::vector<Foo> f;
std::vector<Foo> cp = f; //deep copy. All Foo copied
std::vector<Foo*> f;
std::vector<Foo*> cp = f; //deep copy (of pointers), or shallow copy (of objects).
//All pointers to Foo are copied, but not Foo themselves