Shared files don't move to trash?!

I'd have to simply suggest a good backup. In the old days of ASIP (the OS 9 and earlier Mac server) there was a network trash folder created for each user (as there is now). If a user disconnected (or crashed) before emptying the trash, the files could pile up and make more work for the administrator. In OS X, the default is to immediately delete files from a network volume in order that they not get piled up and lost. I don't believe you can change this, nor should you unless you're going to ttemember to look for the invisible trash files and delete them on a regular basis.

If you have network homes or PHD's enabled, files from your home folder can be placed in the trash without being immediately deleted even though they are on a network volume.

But honestly, it sounds like you're in need of a good backup strategy If losing one file to the trash is bad, what are you going to do when your server's HD starts smoking?

Jeff

I haven't used time machine for a server. It may be reliable (it seems fine on my Mac at home) but I can't vouch for it reliability on a server. If you go into advanced mode on the server, you can't use time machine. that may not be an issue now, but it could be. If you're using the newest version of CCC
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
you may be better off than using time machine as you will have more flexibility Time machine is designed to work with one HD. You may be able to swap out HD's with CCC so that you have more than one copy of your backup and you can maybe keep one off site.

As for the immediate deletion, if you had users who like to drag lots of stuff to the trash and never empty it, you can end up with a lot of lost HD space that somoeone would need to hunt down and delete - people would be unhappy with that as well. Just can't please everyone 😉

+When I delete a file, it wants to immediately delete instead of moving to trash.+

This is normal AFP 3 behavior for share points that are not used for network home directories.

Fortunately, you can use Time Machine to back up the server just as you would a workstation, regardless of which mode it's in. Yes, you can do this in Advanced Mode, too, although the documentation would lead you to believe that you can't.

On the server-side, you can utilize Time Machine in a couple of ways:

1. You can provide AFP share points that client systems can use for backup. In Server Admin's Sharing section, enable the desired share point as a Time Machine Backup destination.

2. You can use Time Machine on the server to back up volumes local to it (including volumes that house your share points).

--Gerrit

With network homes, your home folder will be stored on the server. When you log in, you rely on the server for everything to work. If you only have 2 users, network homes may not be necessary. Also, there are some apps (MS Office is one) that don't officialy support network homes. Some apps that create large files (Photoshop, Quark, CAD files or whatever) can be a bit problematic whether or not they support network homes. Also, if the server goes down, your files go down as well and you can'y log into your Mac (unless you have a local account on that Mac as well).
Portable Home Diorectories (PHD's) allow you to acces your home with or without the server. Your files are stored and accessed locally, but you sync with the server atspecified times.
If you just get an external HD and attach it to the server, fire up Time Machine, you'll be backed up every hour. You would still want some sort of other backup that you could keep off-site, and a way to rotate backup devices in case one fails. One (just one of the many possibilities) would be to clone the HD with DiskUtility (or CCC or SuperDuper) on a regular basis and keep that clone off-site and allow TimeMachine to keep an hourly backupo on site.

Good luck,

hth

Jeff

Yes, as already noted, a home directory share point is one that has a dynamic mount record for user homes in an LDAP domain to which the client and server are bound (and the server may host as well). That share point serves as the "Users folder" for users who have network homes.

A network home directory share point should not be confused with a collaborative share point, which is a shared folder that multiple users or groups can read from and write to. The problem isn't really the type of share point; rather, it's the way in which the Trash is designed to operate:

Each user has his/her own trash, located in his/her home at ~/.Trash. If the home is local (in the Users folder, by default), then a Sally's trash is in /Users/sally/.Trash. Joe's trash is in /Users/joe/.Trash. When Joe empties the trash, it doesn't affect Sally's trash, since they are two separate folders.

In the case of a network home, the dynamic automount would put mount Sally's home directory share point in /Network/Servers/server-hostname/path/path/.../home-directory-share/sally. So Sally's trash folder would be created within that path, where it's still separate from Joe's.

There is a good reason why share point-based deletion doesn't use a trash. The ability to delete a file or folder is only possible if:

* For basic POSIX permissions only (no special POSIX bits, no ACL entries): The user in question receives the ability to delete an item if he/she has POSIX read and write to the item's parent folder. Permissions of the individual item do not matter.

* When using the POSIX sticky bit (1---), the user in question can delete the item only if he/she has POSIX read/write to the item's parent and is the POSIX owner of the item. An example of these permissions can be found in /Users/Shared - all users can read and write to the folder, but only the user who "put the file or folder there" - the POSIX owner - can delete it.

* With ACLs, the ability to delete an item is possible if the user in question's applicable ACL entries for the item grant the following effective set: 1. The delete control for the item or the delete_child control for the item's parent is allowed for the user; AND 2. it is not the case that both the delete control on the item and the delete_child control on the parent are denied.

But back to the problem of accidentally deleting a file: You could simply set up Time Machine to back up your share points on the server to another drive local to the server computer. This way your server would maintain its own backup. Now, by default, the backup interval is once an hour, but you can change that if you want. You can manually start a Time Machine backup with this command:

*sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper*

Or you could change the value of the StartInterval key in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist. The value represents the amount of time, in seconds, between Time Machine backup attempts. If you decrease it to say 360 (once every six minutes), your server would perform incremental backups ten times more frequently than by default (every hour or 60 minutes). I'd do some testing with this, because I think you may be left with only up to the most recent 24 backups for any one day, which puts your restoration window somewhere between 138 minutes and 144 minutes in our example. In other words, test it out first!

--Gerrit

Message was edited by: Gerrit DeWitt