Ask Slashdot: User-Friendly, Version-Preserving File Sharing For Linux?

petherfile writes: I've been a professional with Microsoft stuff for more than 10 years and I'm a bit sick of it to be honest. The one that's got me stuck is really not where I expected it to be. You can use a combination of DFS and VSS to create a file share where users can put whatever files they are working on that is both redundant and has "previous versions" of files they can recover. That is, users have a highly available network location where they can "go back" to how their file was an hour ago. How do you do that with Linux?

This is a highly desirable situation for users. I know there are nice document management things out there that make sharepoint look silly, but I just want a simple file share, not a document management utility. I've found versioning file systems for Linux that do what Microsoft does with VSS so much better (for having previous version of files available.) I've found distributed file systems for Linux that make DFS look like a bad joke. Unfortunately, they seem to be mutually exclusive. Is there something simple I have missed?

Comments

VMS

[FranTaylor]

use VMS, it's built in

TOPS-20 had it too

yearning already for the lost technology of the 1970s

Simething simple you missed?

[Orgasmatron]

rsync with the --compare-dest option will give changed files, and --link-dest will give whole file trees at set times.

You can do it pretty simple, or quite complicated, depending on your needs and preferences.

rsync --link-dest makes a new tree with the current time, using only enough space for the directory tree and the changed files. On my box, I use it in a cron that runs every 5 minutes and cycles through my backup list. If any of them are older than the interval, it fires off the backup script specific to that type of connection (local LVM, nfs, CIFS/SMB, ssh, etc).

A second cron then prunes those directories so that I've got fewer copies as I go back in time. An example would be pulling a copy every 15 minutes and keep every copy for 2 weeks, keep one from each hour for a month, one per day for a year, one per month for 10 years, and one per year forever.

This can be easily adapted to other schemes. --compare-dest will make a tree with just the changed files, which you can then gather up and sort into the archival tree. Run a second (plain) rsync to sync up the comparison directory when done.

Re:Simething simple you missed?

[bartle]

I would also recommend looking at rsnapshot which is built on top of rsync.

I used to use a development system where the entire fire tree was mirrored at the top of every hour. Recovering old files was as simple as navigating to a different directory.

Personally, I like the rsync solution because it is filesystem agnostic. It also has been around for a long time; whatever you're trying to do, I can guarantee that someone was doing it with rsync 20 years ago.