Microsoft's Shadow Copy Client is a free download, and a cracking tool for recovering previous versions of files: http://www.berbs.us/archives/images/shadowcopy.jpg
We were hoping to be able to use it with Samba and ZFS to create a really good storage solution for our users, with regular ZFS snapshots and simple end user recovery of files. However, after testing Samba, we're finding the permission model hard to manage, and I'm not sure it's going to be a viable solution. So instead I had a quick look at the CIFS server. It does looks much better, and permissions seem to behave exactly as we would expect, but I don't think it has VSS support. While we can still give users access to the .zfs/snapshot folder, it's not so easy to use, so I'd like to request VSS support be added to the CIFS server if possible. I think it would be a great feature to add since you already have the snapshots in place with ZFS, and Microsoft have written the client for you :) There's an added benefit in that Microsoft's own snapshot support is awful: You're limited to 64 snapshots (or 255 I believe if you buy Data Protection Manager), but you can only specify one schedule. So you either get two days of hourly snapshots, or a couple of months of daily ones, etc... Even worse, there's a performance hit each time you take a snapshot, resulting in Microsoft's official advice of: "As a best practice, we recommend that you not overlap backup windows with online maintenance or peak-user demand intervals." In contrast, we're planning to use ZFS snapshots to give us 8x 15 minute snapshots, 24x hourly snapshots, 14x daily, 8x weekly, 12x monthly and 10x yearly. That's still only 76 snapshots, but it's given us far finer protection than Microsoft's system and has the potential for us to supply ten years worth of backups directly to our users. This will be protecting all basic documents on our network: CAD drawings, word documents, spreadsheets, etc. With folder redirection, it will even cover every users Desktop and My Documents folders. Our approach may be an extreme case, but the benefits should be applicable to many people. It's effectively a very low maintenance backup system, with little need for involvement from IT when a user needs to recover a file. If you can add VSS support to the Solaris CIFS server, as far as I'm concerned, Solaris becomes a better storage solution for windows clients than any Microsoft offering. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
