[Samba] File versioning with Samba (on a Linux filesystem)?

[Terry Jones]

Apologies if this question is answered somewhere obvious. I just spent a
couple of hours surfing around trying to find an answer.

I'd like to provide windows clients with access to files via samba and have
samba (or other) do file versioning. In the case that a user happens to
delete a file or we want to return to an earlier version, that should be
possible.

Is there a standard solution for this?

I can think of various ways it might be done, but there doesn't seem to be
much on the net about doing it in practice. Support at the (in this case
Linux) filesystem level would be good. If Samba had an option to do it
automatically, that would be good. I saw something about making a .recycle
bin for file removal, but I didn't get the impression this was going to
provide file versioning.  Less good would be having Samba hooks allowing
external scripts to be run pre or post file save, so that one could use an
external source code control system. Least good is to simply rely on your
backup schedule to hopefully allow recovery.

Thanks for any help...

Regards,
Terry Jones