Hi jpl
You wrote to another poster:
The first goal of e-smith-backup with dar is to backup the server on an Lan smffs, cifs or nfs workstation share. A bug is always possible, specialy on usb backup which is not frequently used.
e-smith-backup with dar always do backup to /mnt/smb.
The question is : is the usb drive mounted on /mnt/smb, and if not why ?
Can you make some tests about it
I appreciate your contribution as it is exactly what I am looking for. However I also find that it is not quite ready for use for backups to USB. My understanding of SME Server is that when you connect a USB drive, the HAL daemon will automatically create the directory usbdisk in /media, but will not actually mount the drive in that directory (you have to do that manually). The directory is removed when the USB drive is disconnected. When configuring e-smith-backup with dar to backup to USB (using "Configure workstation backup") the software seems to get confused if the USB drive is connected but not mounted: it sees the usbdisk directory and allows you to select it, but when the backup is run it creates the backup in "/media/usbdisk " where a trailing space is added to the target directory. That directory is of course on the local server and not on the USB drive.
If the USB drive is connected and manually mounted when configuring the backup then the first backup is successful, and is created in /media/usbdisk/hostname on the USB drive. However the next backup attempt then fails, with error:
FATAL error, aborting operation
Badly formatted terminator, cannot extract catalogue location
Dar error during backup : 2
Backup terminated: backup failed - status: 7424
If the /media/usbdisk/hostname directory on the USB drive is renamed then successive backups work OK.
My conclusion is that there are two issues: the software needs to understand how to mount/unmount/test for mounting of the USB drive correctly, and it also seems to have a minor bug involving adding a space to the directory name in some situations. The "Backup share" selection in the configuration screen is also a little misleading as it is a misnomer - when backup is to USB then it is a mount point. However as the user does not have any options to change the default of usbdisk, it would be preferable to change the wording slightly and make this read-only, eg: "Mount point usbdisk".
I think that the /mnt/smb directory is used for the temporary files. That means that the full capacity of the USB drive is available for storing the backup.
On my wish list would be a request for an option to restore files to a new location, eg in an i-bay - ideally with a picklist for the final directory. This would give the user the option to check the files before doing a restore to original location.
Thanks again for this great contribution.