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Accepted
songei2f
Asked: 2010-10-25 00:17:53 +0800 CST

VSS Copies from Network SMB/CIFS File Share on Mac OS X Client

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We have a file share we want to roll out at work, and someone asked if there is a way OS X clients can see VSS copies on the network share they mount (to restate: a SMB/CIFS share on a server on the network, not a local HFS+ drive) to restore older copies of the file. Quick searches on Google seem to indicate not many people have interest in this or business requirement, or understand the question (assuming the question to be if Apple has an equivalent technology; I am not interested in that question). Does anyone know? I am at the office right now and do not have access to a Mac Book. I would only be interested in newish OS X releases, so 10.5.x to 10.6.x.

UPDATE: Since this is really vendor specific (in terms of the SMB/CIFS appliance/server), I'll accept the answer specific to NetApp since this is the most common scenario according to how Google stacks up with this answer.

mac-osx server-message-block cifs vss

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Best way I've found so far is that you can browse the snapshots from Finder:

    1. Open finder & navigate to the share
    2. Click Go, Go to Folder, & type .zfs
    3. Click into "snapshots"
    4. From there you can drag & drop the files back to the share.

    The problem with this is a lot of times Finder will kick you out of the .zfs folder back into the top level directory of the share. I'm not sure how to get around this. I'd also like to see a better way.

    edit

    Just realized you can set the zfs snapdir to visible & Finder won't kick you out:

    zfs set snapdir=visible your/zfs/file/system

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  2. On a Mac you may access the VSS snapshots this way. This seems to work everywhere I've tried it. 

    smb://DOMAIN;[email protected]/SHARENAME/DIRECTORYNAME/~snapshot/

    So, simply append /~snapshot/ to the end of the share mount path. This also works in the mount command. 

    mount -t smbfs -o nobrowse //USER@SERVER/SHARE/DIR/~snapshot /PATH/TO/MOUNT/POINT

    The -o nobrowse prevents it from showing in Finder (GUI). You can also -r for read only. This should also work on Linux.

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