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Comment by velcrovan | Hacker News Reader

The ideal file-level Time Machine-like tool for ZFS already exists and it is Windows Explorer. Not even kidding. Right click on any file or folder residing on a ZFS share and click on Properties, then click the Previous Versions tab. You can restore the file or folder from any snapshot, or just open it and look at it.

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That is, until you get NTFS bitrot since you don't have checksumming.

GP specifies a ZFS share.

Ahh, interesting, I never thought about that. So that means you have a share mounted probably via NFS/SMB, Windows is able to read the zfs snapshots? Or are the Windows previous versions snapshots separate from the zfs ones?

You can configure samba to look for ZFS snapshots:

        vfs objects = shadow_copy2
        shadow:snapdir = .zfs/snapshot
        shadow:sort = desc
        shadow:format = zfs-auto-snap_frequent-%Y-%m-%d-%H%M

That's awesome. I never expected Windows could integrate with zfs like that.

Speaking of, I always forget this exists too:

https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs/

Explorer doesn’t integrate with ZFS. Instead, Samba lies and says that the files have shadow copies which Explorer can then show you.

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