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Kevin K
Asked: 2010-01-22 12:28:37 +0800 CST

Any Available Versioning File Systems like VMS used to have

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I am looking for a versioning file system like VMS used to have. Are there any modern equivalents I can host for Windows clients? Requirements:

  • Ability to map a drive to the shared file system from XP, Vista, Win7, Samba (Linux)

  • Ability to host this file system either on a Windows Flavor, or CentOS

  • Completey transparent to the end users - looks like a normal drive / share. I am sure I could hack something together with something like SVN, but it would not be transparent.

I have searched Google, and here and found nothing so far.

windows network-share filesystems versioning

4 Answers

  1. OpenVMS Files-11 system is in-fact true versioning file system. Every time a save, copy, or any write is performed, unless the command was specifically parametered not to do so, a new version with the same filename is created up to version 32767. OpenVMS files appear in the following format: filename.extension;version-number (ex: myfile.txt;1 myfile.txt;2 myfile.txt;3 and so on up to: myfile.txt;32767)

    For example, in OpenVMS you can:

    COPY myfile.txt;2 myfile.txt;4

    PURGE myfile.txt (leaves only the latest version)

    PURGE/KEEP=3 myfile.txt (leaves only the latest 3 versions)

    DELETE myfile.txt;3 (deletes only version 3)

    So far, I have not found any software that can remotely replicate the same type of file versioning in Windows - but I'm always looking.

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  2. Starting with Windows 2003, Volume Shadow Copies became available. That do it for you?

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  3. I'm not sure I'd call VMS's filesystem mechanism "versioning" except that it nicely saved a couple older copies.

    NetApp filer's have "snapshots" that allow you to look at what your filesystem looked like as of midnight of yesterday or the 3rd week of last year, or whatever you want to configure it to preserve. They don't use lots of space, either. You can specify a time to make the snapshots or you can perform snapshots manually. You then access these points in time by going into a subdirectory of the directory.

    Sun's ZFS filesystem (available under solaris, recent versions of FreeBSD, and server versions of OSX) also allows you to make snapshots that are functionally identical to the netapp snapshots. You'll need to install Samba to share a ZFS filesystem with a windows client (or use NFS to share it with a unix host).

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  4. Not a solution that is native to windows:

    If you run Apache with dav_svn you can configure it to make a new revision evertyime the file is saved.

    Windows clients can simply connect to the http endpoint and should be able to work (mostly) transparently with the mapped drive have a look at WebDAV and Autoversioning

    EDIT: On a second thought, it sounds like you actually want a DMS along the lines of sharepoint. If you don't want to pay for it: Try the Alfresco Community Edition after a week of fiddling I had it set up to the point where I had native smb mounts for our windows users. Versioned Documents with a nice Web UI for End Users and authentication integrated with our Domain (but this was under Linux with OpenLDAP and Samba -- Alfresco itself doesn't really care. It's java and available for all major platforms)

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