The nilfs2
filesystem makes temporary snapshots several times a second, for free, due to the way it works (it keeps a detailed log of changes, and reading files actually reads that log, rather than somewhere else; the log can simply be truncated to revert to an older state). Unfortunately, it is for Linux only.
You may want to run nilfs2
on a Linux VirtualBox instance and run Samba to access the files within. This way, all your changes are instantly logged.
nilfs2 is really magical. It uses all of its free space for continuous snapshots, and only stores differences, so you get few-per-second snapshots up to days. Old snapshots will be forgotten as you add new files to clean up space. You can also tell it to never forget some snapshot, and you instantly get a permanent backup (against human error, not hardware failure), without a lengthy copy!
This is silly. Suppose a database transaction (that looks atomic at the high level) performs thirty writes to the disk. Do you need thirty versions? Maybe if you're debugging the database software itself, that's it. But then you know how to solve this problem without looking for third-party software. – Kaz – 2015-03-04T04:01:20.700
3What is so mission critical that it cannot wait 5 minutes? – MariusMatutiae – 2013-10-28T07:20:05.370
How many changes can happen in 5 minutes?? This is going to put a lot of strain on any type of system. – StBlade – 2013-10-28T07:22:45.257
@MariusMatutiae: Maybe editing a text file, as a simple example? I save after almost every line I write... a lot can happen in 5 minutes. Occasionally I end up deleting something I could have used later. Undo only helps if I haven't already undone -- but disk space is cheap so I want to just have all the copies if I can. – user541686 – 2013-10-28T07:23:50.200
@MariusMatutiae: Not to mention that I just lost some data today precisely because the system froze when my editor was writing to a file (no idea why, but that's beside the point). If the file had been backed up somewhere else the moment before it was altered, this couldn't have happened. – user541686 – 2013-10-28T07:27:03.497
I am sure there are editors saving in real time (like vim in Linux) in Windows. It seems a bit of an overkill to require real-time back-up of a system, only to save automatically your drafts. – MariusMatutiae – 2013-10-28T07:32:57.763
@MariusMatutiae: That was just one example, the same can happen with any other kind of file (images, etc.). – user541686 – 2013-10-28T08:00:30.650
Not really a backup solution, but you could look into increasing redundancy using RAID configurations => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID This would give you some protection from hard drive failures which is one (of the many) reasons while we should backup often.
– qbantek – 2013-10-28T16:04:00.823@qbantek: RAID is way overkill here... and besides, I'm using the basic disks for separate purposes (among them Linux), I don't want to convert them to dynamic disks. (And I should really stop saying "disks"... they're two SSDs, one of them much smaller than the other.) – user541686 – 2013-10-28T19:07:22.377