Files not copied when backup directory is on smbfs

Mount a samba share using smbmount and then configure Back In Time to save snapshots into this share. Taking a snapshot don’t work, only some directories are created.

After some investigation: using a windows share it works, using a samba is doesn’t work.

Samba provide some extensions to the protocol to support uid/gid and permissions.
I mounted the share using smbmount (’sudo smbmount’) and I create a directory: the user/group of the new directory are root/root and the permissions are user:rwx and group/other:rx only. Then creating a sub-directory will fail since I don(t have the rights.

To void problems the only solution I found is to mount the share using “-o nosuids,noperms” arguments (not uid/gid and no permissions). This way the application seems to works. The only problem is that snapshots are no longer read-only. Starting from version 0.9.24, user/group and permissions are stored in a special file so restoring them should be OK.

2 Responses to “Files not copied when backup directory is on smbfs”

  1. JW_00000  on September 7th, 2009

    I had the same problem when my snapshot folder was owned by root. (I don’t know whether the fact that this was on a USB disk has anything to do with it.) I had to recreate the folder with me as owner and now everything works correctly.

  2. mtb-cliff  on May 4th, 2010

    I am running Back in Time 0.9.26 (Karmic) and I still have this issue. It is/was driving me crazy as to why the folders were getting created, but none of the files. Is this the same issue? I am backing up to an Ext2 NAS that is shared with Samba. As it is a NAS, it has several users on it and I really would like to keep the permissions in place.

    Thanks, Cliff.


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