BackupPC-users

Re: [BackupPC-users] backing up to NAS

2008-05-04 02:14:49
Subject: Re: [BackupPC-users] backing up to NAS
From: dan <dandenson AT gmail DOT com>
To: "Nils Breunese (Lemonbit)" <nils AT lemonbit DOT nl>
Date: Sun, 4 May 2008 00:14:41 -0600
decided to look this up!  smb1 does not support hardlinks but cifs and smb2 do.  cifs is essentially smb1.1 or something which smb2 is a microsoft rewrite of smb for vista and server2008.  samba does support cifs which means that you may use hardlinks with samba.  you can also skip samba and use the linux kernel modules for cifs/smbfs filesystem mounts.

I did a test on ubuntu 8.04

created a samba share at /root/share

i installed smbfs and then mounted that share via

mount -t smbfs //localhost/share /mnt/sharetest
cd /mnt/sharetest
touch x
ln x y
ls /root/share
and I see x and y!
echo 12345 > /mnt/sharetest/x
cat /root/share/x
shows 12345
cat /root/share/y
shows 12345

so there is your proof and confirmation.

also, NTFS does support hardlinks.  You can mount an NTFS filesystem with samba and use standard linux/unix tools to make a hardlink.

example

mkdir /mnt/ntfse
mount -t smbfs //condor/e /mnt/ntfse
cd /mnt/ntfse
echo 12345 > 1
ln 1 2
cat 1
>12345
cat 2
>12345

the share "E" on condor is NTFS on windowsXP.

FAT32 does not under any circumstances support hardlinks.

one little tidbit here that I don't think anyone has considered.  NTFS supports on the fly data compression.  On linux there are really not any options to do this.  If you want to use a windows share to backup to and dont want to use backuppc's built in compression, or are not using it for backuppc, you can flip on compression on the NTFS server.

Some claim that NFS is faster than samba, but others say samba is faster.  It seems like the the OS involved on each side is the determining factor, and there is no chart that I could find to determin which was faster.










On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 11:34 PM, dan <dandenson AT gmail DOT com> wrote:
This is true, samba does in fact support hard links but it is really just like another NFS!  the filesystem on the other end of the cifs share must support hardlinks as samba is just the layer translating over the network.  Samba can scale better than NFS also.

I don't know if samba support hardlinks on "smb" shares or just "cifs" shares, I have not checked that out.  "cifs" is essential a newer version of "smb" and I don't know what the feature differences are.


On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 12:58 AM, Nils Breunese (Lemonbit) <nils AT lemonbit DOT nl> wrote:
Leandro Tracchia wrote:

> i am trying to backup the data to a NAS (Terastation). i've already
> read somewhere that the NAS needs to have a filesystem that supports
> hardlinks in order for backuppc to be able to do its thing. smb/cifs
> does not support hardlinks (as far as i know) so i cannot mount the
> NAS as a smb/cifs share. so i have two questions:
>
> in what filesystem should i mount the terastation??? (assuming that
> filesystem is supported by the terastation)....

I believe Samba actually does support hardlinks, but it's not a
filesystem. If you have a drive that is formatted as FAT32 for
instance, you won't get hardlinks, since FAT32 doesn't support
hardlinks. If your NAS supports NFS mounts, try that. People here
generally suggest to choose a local/external drive over a NAS: less
hassle and better performance.

> and do i simply just mount the terasation to /var/lib/backuppc/ ????

Sure.

Nils Breunese.

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