The samba recycle bin clarified

[Jonathan Kelly]

> Unless I am wrong, the "Recycle Bin" works only on LOCAL drives.

Alas it does. But users don't know that and shouldn't be expected to
understand the subtleties of operating systems, that's our job. In their
world, when they use Windows or MacOS, a trashcan exists and should exist on
servers as well.

> Like Jonathan Kelly, I mirror network drives at night to a backup server
which writes them to tape during the
> day.  The backup server is running samba just so an administrator can
easily move files back to the
> network drive if they were erased by mistake. 
> This works fine for me.

That's all well and good (and, to some extent, does work for me too).
However, say a user has worked the whole afternoon on a project and she
mistakenly deletes the file by mistake, what then? Yesterday's backup would
be cold comfort indeed. Here's what I would propose:

1) User deletes file in a samba share.
2) samba copies the file to the directory indicated by the trashcan =
/myDirectory option in smb.conf
3) samba appends the full path of the original file in, say, a log.trashcan
file
4) samba then deletes the file

Same-name files could be handled in a file.txt.001 manner, you manage to
find out which is which by greping the log.trashcan file. 

The sheer usefulness of this feature would offset the additional I/O on the
server. And since users don't delete files all the time, I don't think this
would be that noticeble on a fast system.

Regards,

------------------------------- 
Jonathan Kelly 
Systems Analyst
Julien Inc. 
j.kelly at julien.ca
1-418- 687-9205 ext.254 
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