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Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

People kinda love shitting on Windows here but VSS (Shadow Copy) is actually a very underrated and solid feature. Works with NTFS and even better ReFS

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A long time ago, I set up some zfs-in-a-box-OS thing (some solaris fork), and hooked to active directory (i think?) and samba, and windows explorer had a built in context menu to restore files to older versions.

Yep - this is the VFS shadow copy extension for samba, works great! Actually it doesn't require ZFS, just a method to create snapshots and find them - example smb.conf :

    vfs objects = shadow_copy2
    shadow:snapdir = /home/.zfs/snapshot/
    shadow:basedir = /home
    shadow:sort = desc
    shadow:format = auto:%Y-%m-%dT%H_%M_%SZ

Only thing with VSS is that ransomware can delete all your snapshots. Samba shares on ZFS via TrueNAS or the like with VSS support mitigates that attack vector.

Speaking of, any stats out there on which proportion of ransomware is targeted at which distro for linux, freebsd, windows and mac os?

Lot of AV's specifically try to lock that down but yeah its a first pass for a lot of ransomware.

A long time ago, I set up some zfs-in-a-box-OS thing, and hooked to active directory (i think?) and samba, and windows explorer had a built in context menu to restore files to older versions.

VSS is very cool.

I would note -- one advantage of being a file level tool is `httm` will deduplicate file versions by size and modify time giving you only unique file versions. If you take 100 snapshots but the file was only modified 5 times, then you only see 5 file versions, so no more digging through snapshots ever.

> ReFS

Just don’t. Why would anyone use ReFS? It’s a project that Microsoft have failed miserably at, and it’s basically abandonware.

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