Please guys just let me know how does R1Soft do it ?
I would be really greatful.

The kernel. For a better understanding see "Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd Edition" (ISBN: 0-596-00565-2) and start with chapter 12: The Virtual Filesystem.


As shown by various members GNU/Linux allows for making manual or automatic backups and there's file systems that do snapshots of data or allow for COW versioning. I don't know VSS. Can you explain its approach in technical detail?


Have you actually tried anything from post #4?


As far as I understand it is a closed source, proprietary and commercially licensed product. Best contact the vendor directly for information.

I'd recently discovered 'inotify', which sends the calling process an event whenever anything is accessed! In theory you could watch the entire filesystem and then track all 'opens', 'closes', or whatever else you may want to follow. Naturally this could generate a LOT of data and I have no idea how much overhead it uses, but I have heard of others using this technique for doing incremental tracking of daily changes.
-mark

No, there is not.

Effectively VSS takes a snapshot of your filesystem at a particular date/time.
ZFS and BTRFS have the same capability.

I just wen through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify#How_it_works
It needs to open listening for the files I want to monitor.
Well since I want to monitor each file it will become quite tedious.

I can't fully understand Your requirements because You doesn't provide detailed description.

At first. How students access data?
If they are login to samba servers and access samba shares or samba profiles then you can monitor accessed data from samba: smbstatus
For example You could write script that would call smbstatus every 10 seconds and monitor user activity.

If You need something like Microsoft shadow copy then best way is to organize cluster file system. Very good solution is GlusterFS. Here is 4 pages of detailed configuration: http://blogama.org/node/96
All data will be dublicated on change. That would be good solutions for data server mirroring. Under RedHat You can use GFS instead, but it would be pain to configure this file system under non-RedHat system.

Of coure You can use rsync and synchronize everything you need.


Could You give us little of Your IT environment description (what OS and software will be used) and what exactly You need to monitor?
Also describe how studens will access Your servers and do You want to monitor desktops or servers?
The more information You provide the better solution we could suggest