"Previous Version" analogue rollback software

Question

Hello there,
I was wondering if anyone here has experience with tools that work in the same way "Previous Versions" work in "M$ Window$".
This tool gives the user the possibilitie to "roll back" changes or recover deleted documents from a file share.
My server is fully backed up, but it would be handy if there was a tool that the users could use themselves. Or a tool that's quicker for us, the admins, to use than the tape robot .
Any suggestions are welcome, please tell me why you think this is a good tool you propose.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You're not on Windows, so things are going to be different.  Both the problems, as well as the solutions. 
For starters, there are the expectations.  Microsoft implemented their rollbacks mechanism in Windows because their patches blew up.  Frequently.  OS X patches do occasionally fail, but rather less often. 
To their credit, Microsoft has gotten vastly better here with their patch quality and their test coverage in recent years, though they still have a wildly more varied hardware base and a massively larger regression matrix to run; they've got a gazillion variations their software must function on, and that means far more corner cases than exist with the more constrained systems and hardware that Apple supports.
As for your questions, with Mountain Lion 10.8, you can roll back changes within a document with autosave.  (The "Save" mental model has changed, too, starting at 10.7.)
With Time Machine, you can roll back files to any arbitratry point.  That works with a local disk, and can save files to OS X Server or to Time Capsule.  The clients can self-manage that, too.
There are other approaches to the general problem, too, ranging from git or mercurial to Dropbox.com or Box.com, for instance.
Your reference to a tape robot implies this might be a rather larger site, so you may want to avail yourself of the Mac Enterprise mailing list; that's where the folks with the bigger configurations tend to lurk, so you'll find discussions of OD, Sharepoint-like solutions, backups and other such in the archives over there.