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Ext3 has COW patches: http://www.ext3cow.com/ext3cow/Welcome.html (available now! PATCH YO KERNEL DAMNIT!)

NILFS2 is a filesystem that supports infinite snapshots, provides partial dedup and will work towards providing more (no patches needed!)

BTRFS is working on dedup support... (best bet!)

Isn't this just a less elegant approach then having a versioning file system? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Snapshots_and_clones http://www.ext3cow.com/Welcome.html And if you really, really want to do it this way, just consistently use "save-as"

I think you must be confused over what a versioning filesystem is.

VMS's Files-11, which is what the GP described, is a versioning filesystem. It's ZFS which is the less-elegant approach if you want file versioning. Snapshots aren't the same thing at all.

Isn't this just a less elegant approach then having a versioning file system? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Snapshots_and_clones http://www.ext3cow.com/Welcome.html And if you really, really want to do it this way, just consistently use "save-as"

wayback, copyfs, and ext3cow are all fairly stable versioning filesystems for linux. I'm not sure if they let you stop non-root users from getting old versions, but I don't see why you'd want people to have to ask an admin to get old versions of their files?

I don't use OpenSolaris, so I won't be seeing the benefits of this any time soon. (I once tried to install it, and couldn't work out the partitioning scheme, I don't install operating systems for fun any more.)

This is a great example of free software. Someone wants a feature, and they code it up.

Anyway, I was looking at getting something like this for MS Windows or Ubuntu the other month (instead of a proper version control system for people who couldn't cope). I found some interesting projects.

For example:
ext3cow, which you can use with a Time Traveling File Manager.
Copyfs is another versioned file system, and runs on FUSE.

In the end I didn't end up using either project, instead the usual folder with old version, as compared to folder with newer version is being used. (Curse tech illiteracy.)

Anyway, good work to those folks!

Now if they only had a good standard API to a versioned, networked filesystem. Then I would be in heaven. But a guy can dream...

A less GUI-driven but probably more robust implementation of a similar idea is ext3cow.
If you want the GUI for it, add on The Time Traveling File Manager.

First of all this isn't really comparable to time machine, as it's just another rsync based backup system. That being said there's ext3cow that's been available for Linux for some time.

It's a work in progress, but it's already quite stable. Maybe if more people get into it, development speed will increase. There's even a simple GUI available.

from the website:
http://www.ext3cow.com/

Ext3cow is an open-source, versioning file system based on ext3. It provides a time-shifting interface that allows a real-time and continuous view of the past. This allows users to access their file system as it appeared at any point in time.

Ext3cow was designed as a platform for regulatory compliance, and has been used to implement secure deletion, authenticated encryption, and incremental authentication. See the publications page for more details.

Some advantages of ext3cow:

      1.
              It does not pollute the name space with named versions
      2.
              It has low storage and performance overhead
      3.
              It is totally modular, requiring no changes to kernel or VFS interfaces

you can simply revert your filesystem to where it was at any arbitrary point in time.

No, you can't. According to this example you need to issue an explicit "snapshot" command — I checked my facts before posting, as well as I could, anyway. There is no word yet on the maximum number of snapshots — they may well be limited to 20 as well.

What a major oopsie, I might add... I mean, you could've come up humbly with something "As far as I know, ext3cow is better, because it requires no explicit snapshot-taking". Then it would not have been such an embarassment to be wrong.

But you chose to use terms like "wankfest", "mouth before ears", etc... Fanboy indeed...

From the example screenshot it appears it is a file system. You take a snapshot of your system at some point in time and it stores this data even when files change. Of course, with any file system it is important to have functionality that allows you to view the files as well...

It's a feature, and a pretty cool one. I wouldn't mind this in Linux. This is not a bad thing.

The home page for the ext3cow filesystem also does a good job of referencing other versioning filesystems and the like. I think you'll find what you want linked from there. I recommend Wayback, although it doesn't do everything you asked for.