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I am currently designing an incremental, rotative backup system for a remote filesystem to be accessed over SSHFS.

There is this one aspect I still haven't figured out: Protecting the users from their own mistakes, from accidentally deleting some files without even noticing.

A backup can't protect them against this, as the user might not notice about his disastrous action for a long periods and, given enough time, the undesired removal of the data will get propagated through the backup snapshots until completely removing the data from the system.

One can always increase the backup periodicity, and keep those backups for longer time, but this doesn't seem like a reliable solution to me.

I have also thought about a recycle bin, and I have checked libtrash, but I'm looking for a more standard/configurable solution.

Is there a popular design used to be covered in such situations?

poinu
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    Nothing can protect a user from forgetting they deleted a file five years ago and then asking for it to be restored, except a five year old backup. – Michael Hampton Feb 19 '18 at 23:09
  • Sounds like you want to permanently archive user's trash contents. It would actually be feasible. Just scavenge their trash for old files and move them to your permanent archive with as much metadata as you can scrape from the trash, such as file/deletion date-time, original location etc. The main problem will be the files that are deleted without going to the trash, or files moved to a crazy locations. We had a user move the contents of a shared folder to his desktop one day because he wanted a shortcut on his desktop. As for backup solutions I am currently loving https://www.borgbackup.org – BeowulfNode42 Feb 20 '18 at 00:29
  • Yes, I've thought about a remote trash before, and I really believe its a good mechanism in that it doesn't depend on the date of deletion, and you don't need to keep inifite backup copies either. But what technology to use? I haven't been able to find a remote trashcan implementation for SSHFS, SMB protocol supports it, but I need a secure protocol. @BeowulfNode42 My plan is to use borgbackup, thanks for the tip :) – poinu Feb 20 '18 at 13:55

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