Recycle Bin for Network Drives

[Jeff Mottle]

I know this is a wild shot in the dark, but I'm trying to figure out a way to prevent items deleted on a network drive from being lost forever, and instead go to the recycle bin like local drives. Twice this year I have lost hours of work by accidentally deleting a file I did not mean to. Unfourtunately the files were created during the same day, so the nightly backup had not taken place.

 

I googled for hours last night looking for a solution, but have not found anything. There are a couple of apps that that work if your file server is windows based, but my NAS is linux based using OpenFiler, which uses the ext3 file system. Any suggestions or solutions, or hacks would be greatly appreciated.

 

Cheers.

[SandmanNinja]

For a network solution, need to use some sort of archival solution for file restores (as far as I know).

 

Tivoli Storage Manager keeps up to 3 versions of each file on your network.

[shaneis]

ext3 data recovery...nasty! It can be done although you may not be able to recover the complete files.

 

How to undelete data on an ext3 partition - http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/howto/undelete_ext3.html

 

Does this NAS exist as the only Linux component in a Windows network?

 

One to consider is Bacula - http://www.bacula.org/en/ - you can create your own custom config's for it. Maybe a command to create a snapshot of a given file to a separate partition on the NAS before deleting from the original partition in conjunction with a copy-on-write command pointing to a separate partition.

 

So, a file is created, it is written to two partitions. Whenever any file is deleted, a snapshot is created and written to a third partition.

 

You might also want to increase the amount of snapshots/ incrementals that your backup software performs each day to one/ hour. It may take extra storage media, but these days it's roughly $0.10 per GB, so it's easily in budget.

Edited November 7, 2008 by shaneis

[Jeff Mottle]

Yeah I saw that link last night for restoring a file and decided it would be quicker to just start the document over. I know VERY little about Linux administration, so I'd likely still been working on trying to recover the file My brother in law set up the NAS for me so that I could use software RAID. Windows shares to an old XP box was not cutting it. I use the GUI to do any admin on it.

 

I did find this app http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec Multiplatform and I was able to run it from the Linux command line via SSH. It's pretty cool and can recover a ton of diffetent file types. It did recover quite a few word docs from the partition, which is what I was trying to recover. Unfortunately it was just garbled text...

 

Ahh well, at least I can now try to recover the data next time.