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I have a NAS that is used to store data from our LAN. For many years I've relied on tar or cpio to back up selected directories to tape. When I backup complete partitions or disks on the various computers I generally use dump as per the recommendation of W. Curtis Preston in UNIX Backup & Recovery.

I've recently decided to make one archival backup of the NAS, but it appears that dump does not work in my situation, possibly because of the format of the NAS. It is attached to our Linux or FreeBSD machines as a CIFS device at /media/nas, and the Windows ones as 'network storage' which I assume is SMB. It is a 2 Terabyte Buffalo Link Station. I would prefer to be able to use dump as per Preston's comparison of backup reliability, but will use cpio if no one can suggest a viable alternative.

derobert
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apolinsky
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  • I looked at DAR and find it a capable solution, but decided to revert to an older backup solution I've used in the past, Bacula. – apolinsky Mar 31 '15 at 19:36

2 Answers2

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Dump requires direct access to the underlying block device. So you can't use it on a network filesystem, unless you run it on the server (in this case, you'd need to run dump on the NAS, not on a client of the NAS). Or remove the drives from the NAS and attach them to a PC, presuming you can assemble any RAID arrays that the NAS created.

As a side note, you might want to get more recent backup advice than a book from 1999.

derobert
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You can use DAR. Among other things, it features an incremental mode that runs efficiently. Since your NAS is 2 TB big, being able to do incremental backups is one important feature to consider.

For more details on the relevant DAR calls, see also, e.g. my DAR script collection.

maxschlepzig
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