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Me and some friends are the network admins at our local university. Our duties include managing a small nas built on a desktop machine running latest debian.

The user base (approximately 300 people) is quite varied, it ranges from network admins level guys, like us, to people who can barely turn on a laptop.

Currently we achieve sharing in two ways:

  • web interface through apache2, read only
  • samba share, read and write

We have never really been concerned about a linux user that after mounting the share on his local machine accidentally wipes out the entire NAS, because linux is not that common and because we trust linux users.

Recently this steam bug came up on slashdot and we were very concerned, especially because one of us uses steam on his arch desktop.

Steam will (hopefully) be fixed soon, while the problem remains. I suspect such a slip can be quite common, if it isn't I think that finding a better, safer way to share the folders is a good idea anyway.

Making a backup is not an option because we're on a strict budget, not granting write permission to the samba users also is not good because files get moved, renamed and deleted and we do not do this for a living, nor we'd have time to do that anyway.

TL,DR: we'd like to find a way to share a debian filesystem granting users read and write permissions, but somehow protect the files from accidental deletion, accidental as in "rm -rf /". The user base uses windows, *nix and mac os so some os specific solution would do no good. We currently use samba but we're open to different solutions.

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There's a VFS samba object that implements the recycle bin:

The vfs_recycle intercepts file deletion requests and moves the affected files to a 
temporary repository rather than deleting them immediately. This gives the same effect as 
the Recycle Bin on Windows computers.

I's added as simple as this (in the share definition):

vfs objects = recycle

However, you should really consider something not so legacy to have an inexpensive ways of preserving the original state of the directory tree and files. I suggest you start using ZFS and it's snapshots. This is really simple, powerfull, decent and flexible.

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  • Thanks for your feedback. I am upvoting your answer but not marking it because I feel there's much more to say about my question, I'll wait some more time.
    – Vladimir Cravero
    Jan 20, 2015 at 9:53

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