Topic: File size limitation with SMB?

[toothandnail]

I've been using Synbak (http://www.initzero.it/products/opensource/synbak/) to create backups (tarred and gzipped). Generally, it works well. However, on a couple of systems, the size of the backup seems to be a problem.

I run a script which mounts an SMB share (in this case, located on a Zyxel NAS unit), then runs the backup. On most of the systems that I'm using this method, the backup is under 1 GB. However, on the two systems I've just tried, it is going to be a good bit bigger - in uncompressed form, the file server has something in the region of 90GB of data. Not sure how much data is on the mail server, but its probably fairly big as well - the firm gets quite a few large file attachments.

What seems to be happening is that the backup fails after around 2GB. So I'm wondering if I've hit a problem with SMB file sizes, tar/gzip or Synbak. I've done a bit of hunting on the forum, but not found anything that looks relevant.

Can anyone tell me if they've seen problems transfering big files to SMB shares?

paul.

[Jáder]

This limitation is "hidden" somewhere... nobody really know where... if you could help to find it, would be easier to fix.
Search here in forums for "2GB limitation" and "4G limitation" and you´ll see a lot of doubts about where is it.

Almost everyone agree this limit shouldn´t exist anymore... but it´s there... hidden in some obscure place.

Good luck in your quest.

Jáder

[toothandnail]

This limitation is "hidden" somewhere... nobody really know where... if you could help to find it, would be easier to fix.
Search here in forums for "2GB limitation" and "4G limitation" and you´ll see a lot of doubts about where is it.

  I see what you mean. I obviously searched on the wrong terms...

Almost everyone agree this limit shouldn´t exist anymore... but it´s there... hidden in some obscure place.

Good luck in your quest.

Thanks. I've changed the mount to use cifs instead of smb, so tomorrow I'll be able to see if that makes any difference. I guess the next step will be to try copying a big (2gb+) file to the NAS and see what happens to it...

What fun. I guess I can split the backup, but its going to take a lot more work. I hope I can find the problem.

paul.


[/quote]

[toothandnail]

Further to this, changing the mount command to use cifs instead of smb seems to have solved the problem. Synbak ran without errors last night. Though I may have to look at another approach. The mail server produced a backup of 6.9 GB, and the file server produced a backup of 61 GB. Pulling files out of tarred and gzipped files that large could be a very long process!

The only other problem I had was with the file server. The umount command at the end of my script seems to have hit something of an error - multiple reports of 'resource busy' in the log. Maybe I need to put in a longer sleep command there...

paul.