Any Available Versioning File Systems like VMS used to have

I am looking for a versioning file system like VMS used to have. Are there any modern equivalents I can host for Windows clients? Requirements:

• Ability to map a drive to the shared file system from XP, Vista, Win7, Samba (Linux)

• Ability to host this file system either on a Windows Flavor, or CentOS

• Completey transparent to the end users - looks like a normal drive / share. I am sure I could hack something together with something like SVN, but it would not be transparent.

I have searched Google, and here and found nothing so far.

From serverfault Kevin K

• Starting with Windows 2003, Volume Shadow Copies became available. That do it for you?

  Evan Anderson : VSS isn't really versioning. The VMS versioning mechanism, which is really pretty cool, is actually versioning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versioning_file_system#Files-11_.28OpenVMS.29 The problem with this mechanism is that applications need to be sure not to do stupid when "saving" new version like "create a temporary file, write to the temporary file, delete the original file, rename the temporary file".

  squillman : That's true. The VMS file system did have that in its court.

  joeqwerty : Maybe I'm missing something but doesn't Shadow Copies for Shared Folders fit the bill here? - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc758899(WS.10).aspx

  Kevin K : Users with little technical abilities (95% of normal folks) will not find this remotely usable. It is much easier to see multiple versions going back in time in the place where you put the file than to try and navigate around to find the last version that is different than the current version.
  From squillman

• I'm not sure I'd call VMS's filesystem mechanism "versioning" except that it nicely saved a couple older copies.

  NetApp filer's have "snapshots" that allow you to look at what your filesystem looked like as of midnight of yesterday or the 3rd week of last year, or whatever you want to configure it to preserve. They don't use lots of space, either. You can specify a time to make the snapshots or you can perform snapshots manually. You then access these points in time by going into a subdirectory of the directory.

  Sun's ZFS filesystem (available under solaris, recent versions of FreeBSD, and server versions of OSX) also allows you to make snapshots that are functionally identical to the netapp snapshots. You'll need to install Samba to share a ZFS filesystem with a windows client (or use NFS to share it with a unix host).

  Geoff Fritz : While I agree with your sentiment of VMS's "versioning" it *is* a nice feature from the end-user's point of view, and one that I regularly go looking for every year or so, just to see if any of the new file systems implement such a handy feature. "foo;verion" is so much more elegant (and easier to grasp for a novice, IMO) than "/mountpoint/.zfs/snapshot/five_days_ago/full/path/to/foo". It was about the only thing I liked of VMS when I was forced to endure it in college.

  tegbains : ZFS is not in MacOS X. Apple pulled it out :(

  chris : @tegbains: Wow, that's a fat bummer. ZFS really seems like the killer app that just hasn't gotten traction. I keep expecting embedded devices with freebsd or opensolaris to have it instead of linux for things like NAS boxes.

  tegbains : @chris: I've started building my own OpenSolaris based NAS/SAN devices. You do need to learn to use the zfs/zpool/nfs/iscsi tools but they are not that hard. There is always NexentaStor if you want a paid GUI.
  From chris