UnRaid to Support Shadow Copies?


ogi

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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

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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

 

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  • 1 month later...

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

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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.

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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

 

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  • 3 years later...
  • 2 weeks later...

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!!

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  • 1 year later...

+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.

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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 by eek
Added thoughts on issues due to cache drives.
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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.

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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... 

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  • 2 years later...

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.

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