Now at my workplace we use a very large multi-terabyte filer to store all of the company's data. We have regular tapebackups which go to IronMountain for safe keeping. I know on the Unix side that in any given directory there exists a .snapshot directory. You can go into this thing and look at snapshots that go back to up to a week. In fact, when a user accidentally deletes stuff they need and did it within the last week, I can go in there to whatever directory they were in and go into that .snapshot directory and restore whatever they deleted, actually they can do that themselves and I've instructed some to do just that. This backup mechanism is something of a mystery to me and I will investigate how this is done, but I was wondering if this was something that could be done in a home linux setting? I have all of my data stored on a 250G hard drive that is rsynced with another hard drive for backups. I would love to implement that snapshot feature on the main harddrive.

I'd love to be able to do this with Linux - Plan 9 apparently does this with it's default file storage. The closet that I've got to transparent browsable backups with Linux is rdiff-backup, which extends rsync with multiple stacked backups. The latest backup exists as a normal copy of the files, and the utility can reconstruct previous versions from compressed diffs tucked away in a sub-directory.