Hi everyone!
I've recently set up a NAS running TrueNAS Scale and learning about ZFS and associated machinery. ZFS has a pretty cool feature called snapshots, which allow for a kind of version control, but for the whole file system. I set up Tiered Snapshots, which seem to be working great!
To my surprise, there didn't seem to be an easy way to actually browse these snapshots. Yes, you can use "Previous Versions" on Windows, but I'm running Fedora at the moment, so that doesn't help. You can also access .zfs/snapshot/ at the root of the dataset, which is fine if you know exactly which snapshot you want, otherwise it seems a bit clunky. There is also httm, which is a "CLI Time Machine" I've yet to learn more about, but I was looking for something a bit more graphical / browser-based.
Thus, with much hacking and vibing, the proof-of-concept Timeship was born! It has a thousand limitations and compromises for now, so I'm mostly reaching out to see if there is any interest from others on this.
If you use tiered snapshots which happen to be named similar to mine, you can try it out like this:
docker run -p 8080:8080 -v /mnt/tank/your/dataset:/mnt/:ro ghcr.io/smilyorg/timeship
For now, it has a very simple file browser, it detects and shows snapshots via the aforementioned .zfs/snapshot/ directories, allows you to preview the file system and text files at different points in time, and allows you to download a file at any snapshot.
Of course, extending it to support different ways to see the history would be nice, image preview, diffs, downloading archives of multiple files or directories, supporting histories beyond ZFS (e.g. git or borg backups), the list could go on and on. I can't claim I'll have the time to implement any or all of those, but you gotta start somewhere :)
What do you think? Any ideas & comments very welcome!
Hi! Thanks a lot for trying it out!
I manage all my apps via docker compose, so I'm actually less familiar with TrueNAS apps, so I'm happy that setup was quick :) Would you be interested in contributing a short guide on the setup?
Yeah, I was thinking something along those lines as well. Maybe being able to "diff" between two snapshots as well, for example to see what was changed in a snapshot compared to its predecessor. Would be cool to have file diffs as well :)
Yeah, that would be nice too. I think archiving / zipping multiple files or folders on the fly is fairly straightforward in Go, it's just the matter of putting in the time to make it happen.
If you have any other ideas, let me know! Or open an issue directly :)
Some of the other things I was thinking of are just in the README roadmap, but I'll move them to issues soon enough I guess
I am not confident enough in my knowledge of TrueNAS apps myself to judge if my setup process is how you're supposed to do custom apps, tbh, so i'd rather not try to contribute a guide that could potentially have other users run into trouble ๐
Hehe, alright, no worries! If you change your mind the PRs are open :)