Samba is worse for file permissions as they're all tied to an smbuser rather than a unix user id.  MacOS supports rsync, and should come with it built in (along with cron) so rsnapshot should work fine there too but I'm not a Mac guy so I don't know for sure.  For day-to-day access and using this as a shared network mount, you should just stick with NFS, and look into setting up some network users via NIS--that'll let you configure NFS to preserve file permissions.

On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 3:45 PM, Mark Phillips <mark@phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:
Todd,

Thanks for your comments. I was not very clear on how I am making the backups.

Linux boxes - The machine with the usb drive attached is running rsnapshot (ssh & rsync) to backup all the Linux boxes to the usb drive. The rsnapshot script is run by cron at appropriate times. Restoring from the backups will most likely be via ssh/cp or maybe an rsync if I need to move a lot of files.

MacOS - the one laptop will access the usb drive over NFS using some native MacOS backup application. I could have used Samba, but it is slower than NFS, so I thought I would give NFS a try. I have to buy some software for the Mac box to read/write ext4, but it is not very expensive. Restores will be via NFS mount on the Mac box. I am a little out of my depth with the Mac box (Macbook Pro).

Do you think I should switch to Samba for the MacOS backup?

Thanks!

Mark

On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 1:45 PM, Todd Millecam <tyggna@gmail.com> wrote:
NFS exports might not be the technology you want to use.  If it's possible, I'd setup an rsync script, because that will let you preserve user permissions, directory structure, time stamp, and let you resume partial backups, and it's much easier to set it up on a timer via a cron script--it takes about 20 minutes to learn how to use and script with so it's really a good time investment.  I was in a shop that did NFS exports for a while only to find the backups weren't always viable and only had about a 70% success rate for a usable nightly backup.  When we switched over to rsync, we would only get one bad backup every two months.
NFS just backs things up based on the Unix User ID in /etc/passwds (or whatever PAM authentication module you're using, so you'd really need to setup NIS in your house for this to work properly) on the host machine.  If the user doesn't exist, it will preserve the user id and permissions by default, but if that user/group doesn't exist on the server hosting the backup, then you won't have read-write permissions to restore it.

On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Mark Phillips <mark@phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:
I am setting up a usb drive to act as a NAS for backing up a couple of computers (Linux and Mac) on my network. I have it running, but I want to make sure I have the correct settings.

I read quite a few Debian and Ubuntu howtos about NFS, but they sometimes offered conflicting information. For the backups, I want to preserve the file permissions, time stamp, etc.

In /etc/exports I have

/media/backup    192.xxx.xxx.0/24(rw,sync,root_squash,no_subtree_check,fsid=0,insecure)

The insecure is for Macs to access on ports other than 1024....at least that is what one article said. It does not mean the connection is insecure....

/etc/fstab for the usb drive

UUID=6997d1c2-5ed7-4f32-9d5e-564cadd7bc6c /media/backup ext4  rw,nodev,noexec,noatime,nodiratime,sync,data=ordered 0  0

Thanks!

Mark

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Todd Millecam

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