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

[Barry, Christopher]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: samba-bounces+cbarry=silverstorm.com at lists.samba.org 
> [mailto:samba-bounces+cbarry=silverstorm.com at lists.samba.org] 
> On Behalf Of Terry Jones
> Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 12:39 PM
> To: samba at lists.samba.org
> Subject: [Samba] File versioning with Samba (on a Linux filesystem)?
> 
> 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
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I do something like this nightly. It's not 'real-time', and I store the
versions on another box, but the effect is pretty similar. I have
everyone map this box via the logon script, so they all have access to
their older stuff. Letting people restore their own files is nice. ;)

It's done with a combination of glastree
<http://www.igmus.org/code/#glastree>, and custom scripting I wrote to
create a doubly-nested DFS tree, and to create all of the samba
configuration files and acl files on the fly. I'm using NIS, and I'm
setting access perms based on this - so it may need serious hacking if
your environment is totally different.

If anyone is interested, I can tar up all of the scripts and send them
out. There's nothing approaching documentation for it, but I can
probably give limited help to anyone who has questions.

lemme know.

-C