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We have a file share on a debian server which people will be putting mostly small plain text, word, excel, pdf, misc, files into. We want to keep file level versioning of everything placed in that file share. We'd like all of the versioning to happen automatically in the background every time a change is made to a file.

What's the easiest open source way to do this? What's the best versioning system to do this with? Is there an automated versioning system like this out there somewhere?

I'm not asking for complete instructions. I'm just looking for recommendations or keywords to search with (other than "automatic versioning files" which didn't find me much).

We're already backing up the volume many times a day. We don't want to do volume snapshots etc. We're looking for some kind of automated file level versioning.

Update:

Using incron to autocommit changes in a folder:

http://andrew.mcmillan.net.nz/blog/using_incron_to_autoversion_a_directory

Thanks to using the new keyword "autoversioning" I found the above which I'm interested in. It's a script which is triggered from incron every time a file changes. One problem is incron isn't recursive.

caleban
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2 Answers2

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I would try a versioned filesystem, such as ext3cow or nilfs. I have no experience with them, but they have always looked like a very interesting idea to me.

kovan
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  • Thanks for the tip. So far the people I'm working with have shied away from a filesystem with snapshots because we already back up the volume every 30 minutes and they want versioning of the files not the volume. Nowdays is zfs the best, most stable, filesystem with snapshots? It looks like versioned filesystems and snapshots are the same right? You mount a "previously saved filesystem" either way it looks like. – caleban Nov 12 '10 at 01:00
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The SVNAutoVersioning directive to mod_dav_svn is one solution.

robert
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  • Thanks for the link. I'm reading up on it now. This one looks promising. The only catch is it looks like it only works with WebDAV clients? I was hoping it would work no matter how people accessed the share i.e. via sshfs or non-WebDAV web access such as Mollify. – caleban Nov 12 '10 at 00:11
  • When I did this I mounted one the DAV share using davfs2 on Linux (which I don't really recommend) and shared the mount with samba. This made it a little slow, but I wasn't interested in performance. – robert Nov 12 '10 at 11:28