Vista Backup and Ubuntu Samba

[Chris Rees]

 On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 11:11:14PM -0400, Michael Dunigan wrote:
>                    I am trying to use a share created on an Ubuntu server
>    (v8.04.1) as a backup target for my work Vista laptop.  To make things
>    more complex, the share maps to a directory in the file system that is
>    on an external drive and the file system on the external drive is
>    FAT32.  Sorry, I do have reasons for this complex combination, and I
>    understand that this might be the reason all is not working.
>
>    When I try to use Vista Complete PC Backup, it gives me an error
>    message that I searched down with Google and it told me that I did not
>    have "Full Control" of the file space.  The error says that this is a
>    common problem with "Samba based" NAS units.  (Error 0x800700B7)
>
>                    I know that most of this is Microsoft saying that if I
>    had a Windows server this would not be a problem, but does anyone have
>    an idea how to get this to work.  I have to have the Vista box to do my
>    work, so I would like to use the Samba share to back it up.  If the
>    problem is just the complexity that I have introduced, I am just
>    looking for confirmation that simplifying the setup is what I need to
>    do.  I am hoping that someone out there has gotten this to work and can
>    give me some pointers.
>

As far as I remember, 'Full Control' in MS-speak means changing of
permissions, ownership etc. Because the Windows and UNIX standard
permissions differ, Samba has to emulate permissions in the ACL style
that Windows uses; all set in smb.conf.

This means you can't use a Windows client to change permissions on
Samba-shared *NIX partitions.....

Oh, you're also screwed because you can't back up Vista to FAT32:
archives would be bigger than the 2 GB (?) file size limit, and the
file system doesn't use ACLs; meaning you'll lose all permissions
info. For Vista, that is a big deal.

So.... You'll need to use a different backup program. If you're
desperate to run it to this share, your only solution is to
archive/image the drive (Ghost, perhaps?), breaking up the archive
into ~2 GB chunks, then sending it over the network. Good luck
automating that....

Sorry for the bad news

Chris