Abstract: Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to creating and maintaining a separate compliance store within a domain. Files that are committed within the domain are linked to the compliance store using canonical links. Canonical links are guaranteed to be non-erasable and non-rewritable for the duration of their retention period. When using a source cluster of nodes as a primary production cluster and a target cluster of nodes as a backup cluster, file data and canonical links can be synced from the source cluster to the target cluster to maintain compliance with data retention rules. Non-canonical links can be modified as necessary to ensure snapshot consistency when failover or failback occurs between a source cluster of nodes and a target cluster of nodes.

Abstract: Embodiments are directed towards replication and restoration of file system objects stored on file system clusters. Modified file system objects may be tracked using a snapshot tracking file corresponding to a snapshot. The snapshot tracking file may be employed to generate a snapshot change set. The snapshot change set may be used to restore a file system cluster to a version corresponding to a snapshot by reversing the changes in the snapshot change set. Also, a snapshot change set may be used to replicate file system objects by committing the included changes on another file system cluster. If a primary file system cluster becomes unavailable the file system may failover to the secondary file system cluster. If the primary file system cluster later becomes available it may be restored by using snapshot change sets generated on the secondary file system cluster.