I am far from super knowledgeable on these sorts of things, so I have no idea on the feasibility of this feature request but I am wonder if it is possible.

 

The request is for Shadow Copies to be supported in Samba Shares.  What this would allow for is that Windows users can access/restore previous versions of a file from the right click menu -> Properties -> Previous Versions Tab -> <select how far back you want to go to restore the file>.

 

All windows users could potentially benefit from this feature.

 

Thanks,

Ogi

So is this like file by file time capsule service for Windows?

So is this like file by file time capsule service for Windows?

 

I hadn't thought of it that way, but that sounds about right. 

 

I'm on my phone so pardon the lack of formatting.

 

Here is an instructional guide showing its use: http://www.engineering.uiowa.edu/ecs/support/previous-version

 

From the wikipedia page it says this feature is available on LVM based storage (for samba servers that aren't windows)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy

 

So is this like file by file time capsule service for Windows?

 

Since making this post, you guys have had a lot on your plate (especially w/ the reiserFS corruption issue, etc), just wondering if there is any other data I can provide relevant to enable this feature.

 

I found some "guides" to get the shadow copy volumes setup on a linux server:

http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/network_administration_guides/samba_reference_guide/30_VFS_13.html

 

Here is some actual documentation on the samba module:

https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages/vfs_shadow_copy2.8.html

 

I would be happy to seek out more information, but again, I am unaware of the technical challenges of such an implementation.

 

Thanks,

Ogi

So is this like file by file time capsule service for Windows?

 

Since making this post, you guys have had a lot on your plate (especially w/ the reiserFS corruption issue, etc), just wondering if there is any other data I can provide relevant to enable this feature.

 

I found some "guides" to get the shadow copy volumes setup on a linux server:

http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/network_administration_guides/samba_reference_guide/30_VFS_13.html

 

Here is some actual documentation on the samba module:

https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages/vfs_shadow_copy2.8.html

 

I would be happy to seek out more information, but again, I am unaware of the technical challenges of such an implementation.

 

Thanks,

Ogi

Ogi, thanks for your patience with us.  I want to explore this further but we are about to go on a feature freeze for 6.0.  Need to clamp down what we have first before we can add any more.  That said, this sounds like something we for sure would want to look into for our windows users.

So is this like file by file time capsule service for Windows?

 

Since making this post, you guys have had a lot on your plate (especially w/ the reiserFS corruption issue, etc), just wondering if there is any other data I can provide relevant to enable this feature.

 

I found some "guides" to get the shadow copy volumes setup on a linux server:

http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/network_administration_guides/samba_reference_guide/30_VFS_13.html

 

Here is some actual documentation on the samba module:

https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages/vfs_shadow_copy2.8.html

 

I would be happy to seek out more information, but again, I am unaware of the technical challenges of such an implementation.

 

Thanks,

Ogi

Ogi, thanks for your patience with us.  I want to explore this further but we are about to go on a feature freeze for 6.0.  Need to clamp down what we have first before we can add any more.  That said, this sounds like something we for sure would want to look into for our windows users.

 

Thanks for the fast reply!  I know you guys are approaching the RC phase of v6.0 (and with that comes a feature freeze), don't worry, I have my expectations in check.

 

I guess I would just like to have an idea of what kind of difficulty implementation of the volume shadow copy module would be (is this a minor undertaking, major undertaking?).  From what I've read it looks like it just leverages existing snapshots (BTRFS supported feature if I understand correctly). 

 

That said, I'm glad you're able to see the value in a feature such as this, I know at work being able to quickly recover a network file (going to a "previous version") has gotten me out of a jam more than once.

 

Thanks again Jon

 

Any news on how to configure Shadow Copies on unRaid?

 

And sorry to open this thread again (this was the top result of the google search 'unraid shadow copies' )

Is Shadow copy supported? 

I'm about to upgrade my nas, I like nearly everything about unraid but shadowcopy for win shares is a highly desired item on my list..  native or via pluggin..

 

 

Edited January 26, 20188 yr by Parax

I too found this old thread based on a basic google search..  I have been relying on  Crashplan for backup and have been thinking about what I'm going to do now that the whole "unlimited backup for cheap" world is changing for me.  I had already bought 2 copies of Unraid, so my answer thus far has been to just have a mirrored Unraid, potentially off site, or at least in a far part of the house (I already had a house fire, so I'm sensitive to both eggs in one flammable house) but I was thinking that for versioning, I'd need to have some kind of script to manage keeping each day's backup separate from yesterdays, and then I thought of shadow copies..

 

IF there's any chance this might be something on the horizon for UnRaid, it would sure influence my plans..  I've got a few months 'till crashplan goes away, but by that time I want to have something at least in the works!

 

Thanks for an awesome product!!

+1 to this. My family is a bit accident-prone and frequently overwrites important files with mistakes (such as a wrong cell in an Excel spreadsheet.) Would be nice if they could restore it themselves without bugging me to manually log onto the server and restore the correct file.

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs-auto-snapshot/wiki/Samba has a nice outline for what is required to do this with instructions for Debian.

 

It doesn't look that difficult if the drives are configured for ZFS (as I suspect is most people's arrays will be nowadays) and the files are written directly to the array - cache drives would add a lot of additional complexity...

Edited February 12, 20197 yr by eek
Added thoughts on issues due to cache drives.

37 minutes ago, eek said:

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs-auto-snapshot/wiki/Samba has a nice outline for what is required to do this with instructions for Debian.

 

It doesn't look that difficult if the drives are configured for ZFS (as I suspect is most people's arrays will be nowadays) and the files are written directly to the array - cache drives would add a lot of additional complexity...

UnRAID does not support ZFS as a standard feature     Perhaps you were getting confused with XFS which what I would expect most people are using for array drives.

Looks like btrfs can also be used for shadow copies with Samba, but never tried it:

 

https://forum.openmediavault.org/index.php/Thread/7331-GUIDE-Windows-Previous-Versions-and-Samba-Btrfs-Atomic-COW-Volume-Shadow-Copy/

13 minutes ago, itimpi said:

UnRAID does not support ZFS as a standard feature     Perhaps you were getting confused with XFS which what I would expect most people are using for array drives.

Yes - my mistake as I'm not at home to look at the portal.

 

Without ZFS and as btrfs is really not ready for Array use it's not really a goer... 

7 minutes ago, eek said:

and as btrfs is really not ready for Array use

I've been using it for years now on all my Unraid servers, though won't dispute that is not as stable as xfs, but for anyone with backups (and you should always have backups), a stable server and an UPS, there's no reason not to use it.

I hate to revive an old thread, BUT. I would also LOVE to see a shadow copy. Parody is awesome, but being able to set a certain directory to be shadow copied to all drives would be awesome. Or maybe even let you pick how may/which drives to copy too. I know you can do some hacky stuff with rsync and user scripts but its a lot of moving parts for something that can probably be build in without too much trouble.

As now we also have ZFS support i would like to revive this , i am using the snapshots plugin with btrfs and it work perfectly , but i had to create a copies of the shares in smb-extra to have them with shadow copy support , all we would need is the option the create a share as subvolume and intergrate the snapshots with shadow copies.

After creating the snapshot schedule in the snapshot plugin this was all i needed to add to the share config and it works.

vfs objects = shadow_copy2
shadow: snapdir = snapshot directory

shadow: sort = desc

shadow: format = snap_%Y%m%d%H%M%S

shadow: localtime = yes

Edited June 25, 20251 yr by ramiro

Has anyone successfully enabled shadow copies with sanoid in 7.2.2? I have spent many, many hours editing /boot/config/smb-extra.conf to no avail.

This is where I landed:

path = /mnt/datapool/data

browseable = yes

read only = no

vfs objects = shadow_copy2

shadow:basedir = /mnt/datapool/data

shadow:snapdir = /mnt/datapool/data/.zfs/snapshot

shadow:snapprefix = autosnap_

shadow:delimiter = _

shadow:format = %Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S

shadow:ignore_suffix = yes

shadow:sort = desc

shadow:localtime = yes

Please advise if there's something obvious I'm overlooking.

I was able to get this working but only with using my own smb config.

More code reused from Level 1 forums...

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/zfs-on-unraid-lets-do-it-bonus-shadowcopy-setup-guide-project/148764

I posted on the forum about it a long while back...

I required the zfs master plugin to guarantee snapshots shadow format..



and I needed at least 2 snapshot premade WITH CHANGES!
https://forums.unraid.net/topic/178033-bmartino1-user-scripts/#findComment-1478664

but yes I have and still have this working with zfs and unraid samba...

view old data on forum:
https://forums.unraid.net/topic/165604-how-do-you-structure-your-shares/#findComment-1419875

Edited December 22, 2025Dec 22 by bmartino1
Data - typo