samba - Jun 1999 - The samba recycle bin clarified

> Unless I am wrong, the "Recycle Bin" works only on LOCAL drives.
Alas it does. But users don't know that and shouldn't be expected to
understand the subtleties of operating systems, that's our job. In their
world, when they use Windows or MacOS, a trashcan exists and should exist on
servers as well.
> Like Jonathan Kelly, I mirror network drives at night to a backup server
which writes them to tape during the
> day.  The backup server is running samba just so an administrator can
easily move files back to the
> network drive if they were erased by mistake. 
> This works fine for me.
That's all well and good (and, to some extent, does work for me too).
However, say a user has worked the whole afternoon on a project and she
mistakenly deletes the file by mistake, what then? Yesterday's backup would
be cold comfort indeed. Here's what I would propose:

1) User deletes file in a samba share.
2) samba copies the file to the directory indicated by the trashcan /myDirectory
option in smb.conf
3) samba appends the full path of the original file in, say, a log.trashcan
file
4) samba then deletes the file

Same-name files could be handled in a file.txt.001 manner, you manage to
find out which is which by greping the log.trashcan file. 

The sheer usefulness of this feature would offset the additional I/O on the
server. And since users don't delete files all the time, I don't think
this
would be that noticeble on a fast system.

Regards,

------------------------------- 
Jonathan Kelly 
Systems Analyst
Julien Inc. 
j.kelly@julien.ca
1-418- 687-9205 ext.254 
-------------------------------

On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Jonathan Kelly wrote:
> > Unless I am wrong, the "Recycle Bin" works only on LOCAL
drives.
> 
> Alas it does. But users don't know that and shouldn't be expected
to
> understand the subtleties of operating systems, that's our job. In
their
> world, when they use Windows or MacOS, a trashcan exists and should exist
on
> servers as well.
Yes, I feel I have to chime in here.  I have had one user who was used to
using their Recycle Bin as a temporary holding spot for documents on
standalone machines, if you can believe that.  They were quite upset when
they got to the network I was servicing and found out all their network
stuff was not coming out in the Recycle Bin after being deleted.
Sometimes I hate users :).  I agree, users have come to expect to be able
to undelete things and that should be a functionality that we can provide
if needed.

I have no clue on how to best implement it in Samba though :)

Sean

------------------------------------------
 Sean E. Millichamp, Consultant
 Ingematics - A Division of Compu-Aid, Inc.