Linux Equivalents for Novell's "Filer"?

Josh Berkus asks: "One of my clients would love to convert their entire office to Linux. But one thing keeps them tied to a NetWare file server: a little utility called 'Filer' Filer allows the sysadmins to retrieve deleted and overwritten files, up to a week after the event. With 70 secretaries using that server, that ability is crucial. I've looked around the Internet, but cannot find anything quite equivalent in the Linux world, except maybe hourly backups and that's a pain. What the client really needs is a utility/mod for the filesystem or network layer that archives files instead of over-writing or deleting them. I had one kernel hacker offer to write me something like that, but my client does not want to be a test case. Note, that we have nothing against Netware, it's just that this client has historically not been able to get good Novell support. Anybody know anything that's already in production like this? Is Reiser working on this for ReiserFS?" This sounds deceptively easy. If this was a personal machine, this would be easy, but the showstopper is that this has to work as a share meaning that this "trashcan" like functionality needs to be implemented at the filesystem level. While I can understand the submittors desire to not be a test case, if there doesn't exist a ready-made solution to this particular problem, how difficult would it be to add this on to ext2/ext3, Reiserfs or some other suitable open source filesystem and test it for reliability?

Second opinion...

[zulux]

Not to be a complete twit - but I woulden't replace the Novell server. If it's stable and does what you want then I'd just let it be. Put your enenrgies into adding value rather than replacing somthing that works with something else. Perhaps a Linux based firewall is needed? Or Linux based VPN so people can get into the office network from home?

Office types love VPN from home - though I'd sugjest OpenBSD for the job over Linux, both would work fine and make people *very* happy if done correctly.

Cheers and good luck.

Re:Eliminate the need

[erth64net]

So, how often do you create backups? Every 5 minutes, 10, 20, what? In the real world, where everyone makes mistakes (gasp! make a mistake!?!), the end-user most likely made a significant change to a document, only to overwrite the changes or delete the document by accident. The NetWare salvage tool is an excellent tool for "undoing" these kind of mistakes while not wasting time retyping the entire document, or restoring the document from backup, and then pulling together the changes that were overwritten from that point (plus, as the sysadmin, I dont have to spend time restoring the document)...

Dont be so quick to criticize, it makes you look like an idiot, and turns people off to asking these types of questions in a public forum.