Is there any way to access/restore the file backups via the windows “Previous Versions”?
I was not able to find a definitive answer on the forums.
My Urbackup server is installed on an ubuntu server with mergerfs and SAMBA shares. BTRFS or ZFS file systems with their associated snapshot features are not an option at the moment.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Any input at all? It’s hard to believe that nobody knows if this is possible or that I’m the first person to ask about this capability.
The “previous versions” thing in windows works by keeping shadow copies on the local drive & pulling old versions out of the system volume information folder using built in Windows features.
It may be possible to hack the registry & possibly other system files so that context menu item does something other than what Microsoft intended, it may also involve hacking or changing system files to pull off…
The sensible answer is “not really”.
Adding an equivalent function & a custom context menu entry would probably be easier, if you want to write the feature, maybe the devs will be interested in including it, the source is all there.
Or you can post in the feature requests section, it’s possible people might upvote it, though it’s not really the purpose the main program is focussed on. You being the first to ask is something I find easy enough to believe as a result.
Alternatively, enable & configure the Windows feature itself to preserve previous versions so you can retrieve them natively.
I apologize for reopening this thread after +3years but my environment evolved and i would like to see where things are in the present.
I am re-deploying UrBackup but now on a TrueNAS environment with ZFS datasets.
In this system, samba exposes the dataset snapshots (created by TrueNAS) as “shadow copies” whcih the windows clients see as “Previous Versions” of files and folders. This works amazingly well.
Can UrBackup do something similar for browsing and restoring files?
Just to clarify, i know i can browse/restore files via the web interface. I just prefer if my users could restore their files directly from windows as it is a much more user friendly interface.
Thanks.
According to the administration manual Section 8.10
If we enable the option Create symbolically linked views for each user on the clinets after file backups
“After a successful file backup UrBackup will create symbolically linked views for each used on the client machine on the backup server. Those views can then be made accessible e.g. via samba file sharing.”
So, if these backups can be made accessible via samba, and samba can now expose snapshots as “shadow copies”, does this mean that backups could be recovered via the windows “previous versions” function?
Am i understanding this right?