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Need something that works like Novell's Salvage utility for file history and restores

Is there a current equivalent to the old Novell Salvage? Salvage allowed a file to be overwritten, upon which the original file was put somewhere on the disk and be recoverable through the Salvage utility. If you saved edits to a file 5 times, you'd see a history of prior 4 edited copies and could choose which one you wanted to recover. Note that these copies are the file's state just before saving changes, not its state at a point in time, like with Snapshots.

Snapshots don't do the same thing because you could edit a file multiple times before the next snapshot.
Microsoft's Previous Versions doesn't do this either.
Shadow Copies seem to be like Previous Versions and Snapshots.

I'm running in a Windows AD domain and have our data on both server NFS and NetApp SAN.

Can someone help me with this?
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arnold
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Backup, shadow copies, not familiar with the referenced novel, but the name suggests a mechanism that provides for a fast recovery.
You covered in your questions much ...

Using a document management solution, documentum, Livelink where by the access to files is managed, and a delete merely makes it no longer available, but admin can restore as well as versions are maintain reflecting changes.

The netapp has snapshots
Presumably that is where the data is. Much depends on how the netapp space is presented to the Windows system FC San lan, or iscsi LUN. Or it is presented as a cifs share... Check netapp San data protection/management options.
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J B

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We use a Document Management System that allows you to save versions. However, this relies on the saving process working properly, which sometimes doesn't happen properly (for a number of reasons) and those edits that were made to the scratch copy can get lost. THIS is reason why using Novell's Salvage was so valuable and why I submitted this question:

If the DMS document check-in process failed at any point, the user would not know this until they tried to open the document again, upon which the system would overwrite the scratch copy (that has the unsaved edits) with a last known saved copy (the original copy that doesn't have them). Then they would complain, which is understandable. With Novell's Salvage, we could go into that scratch directory (NRTEcho folder) and see the history of changes made to that scratch copy and grab the one prior to the last document opening (that had the unsaved edits) and give it to the user.
 
When we moved our documents from Novell servers with NSS storage/Salvage to a SAN with snapshots years ago, the loss of this ability was HUGE and seemingly getting worse. DMS file saving relies on other processes that regularly have issues leading to a fairly regular loss of edits to documents. Salvage mitigated this shortcoming and reduced the amount of repeat work done by our users. As stated before, none of the other file-saving methods can duplicate this functionality. The only other way snapshots might work (not exactly but reduce the amount of lost edits) is if they could be scheduled every 5-10 minutes, which I don't think is possible. Is the only option to go back to Novell for document storage?
Not much available for Windows although this article is not complete as it doesn't enen mention Netware, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versioning_file_system
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From that wiki, looks like Versomatic does exactly what Novell NSS and Salvage used to do (yes, it's funny that Novell, Netware, NSS, and OES are not mentioned in the wiki). But the website link is down and any references I can find on them are from 7-8 years ago. Maybe they're out of business? Oh well, I'll keep looking.
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pgm554
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Thanks to all for the info.
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ASKER

This just might work. We’ll test and see if it does.

Thanks