Comments on: Backing up servers onto a linux box

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:56:07 +0000

Well done mate. To quote Mr. Vader…

The circuit is now complete – When I left you, I was but the learner. Now, I am the master.

Nice one. More of the same please!

By: John

John — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:32:01 +0000

This may come in very handy in the near future, Good work Kris!

By: Kris

Kris — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:46:21 +0000

Thanks for the comment.

I agree that samba mounts might not be the most stable solution, but as long as the machines are on the same local network it’s unlikely you’ll have any problems with it. If you find that samba mounts arent stable enough for your usage then you could do some simple error checking such as…

- Attempt the mount
- Check if a known file exists on the mount
- If so, carry on
- If not, either retry the mount, or send an error email so you can look into it as soon as possible, or use an alternative method to copy the data.

In reality, I’ve been using a windows share mounted through samba on around 15 machines every night for at least 4 years and never had a problem with the mount failing. I do know that windows shares can be a bit flaky over the internet but as long as you’re backing up over a LAN I think it’ll be ok.

Please feel free to share some ways of getting around it, or some code to error check the mounts, as I’m sure you’re not the only person who will read this who may be a bit skeptical.

By: dynamite

dynamite — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:38:19 +0000

Uhh, the Windows SMB Party sounds a bit iffy.
What do you do in cast he smb mount or umount fails?
Your script doesnt seem to be capable of even handling any error situation.