Background: I have vast experience (32+ years) with computers running various OSes. But please consider me somewhere between newbie and mildly experienced with linux. (Lots of Linux holes in my head!)
Server: Windows Server 2012r2 + UrBackup Server v2.3.8. I’ve been backing up 15-20 Windows clients and 2-3 linux clients to this server for several years.
Client: a laptop with…
/dev/sda1 (NTFS) Windows 10
/dev/sdb1 (ext4) Manjaro Cinnamon distro
/dev/sdc1 (NTFS) a 512GB USB storage device
I’m ignoring /dev/sda1 and booting the Manjaro distro. It’s running UrBackup Client v2.34 installed via the Arch AUR. UrBackup client is working just fine and is backing up the system partition (/) or /home or whatever I want it to back up.
I have /dev/sdc1 (NTFS) mounted on /run/media/myusername/usbname and I need to back it up along with my system partition. However, no matter what I try I can’t seem to get UrBackup to read the data on the mounted device. I can access the files just fine via my file manager, but UrBackup stops at the mount point and doesn’t go any deeper. No errors are thrown, it’s just as if the mount point is an empty folder, which UrBackup is happy to back up…as an empty folder.
I push the config down from the UrBackup server. Currently my “Default directories to backup” are:
/run/media/username/usbname;/|System Drive/follow_symlinks,symlinks_optional,share_hashes,one_filesystem
But I’ve also tried simply: /run/media/username/usbname
… and several other variations. It backs up whatever I tell it to back up and doesn’t throw any errors, but only ever just backs up a single empty folder (mount point) when I think it should be backing up the mounted USB NTFS-formatted device.
Any thoughts on why I’m not getting this mounted NTFS USB stick backed up?
/dev/sdc1 on /run/media/cneeper/L9N type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096,uhelper=udisks2)
I didn’t specifically code the mount; it was auto-detected and mounted at boot. Also, you may notice that the mount point is different than what I originally said it was. I was just obfuscating it in my OP. The above is an exact copy/paste, however.
Yep. I can access the mounted drive and sub-directories even as sudo -i
No, I don’t have snapshots enabled. At least I don’t think so. My job logs indicate as much:
Backing up “L9N” without snapshot.
and
Backing up “System Drive” without snapshot.
I understand the concept of snapshots, but haven’t dealt with it in Linux before. LVM appears to be part of the default Manjaro distro, so I had hoped maybe it would “just work”. But something’s apparently not right there. It was more important to get the critical data backing up so I thought I’d figure out snapshots later. I don’t think snapshots would likely to be the cause here, though, since / is otherwise backing up just fine without them (except for maybe a few files held open here and there).
You’re right, of course…Mounting the folder outside of /run did the trick.
Some thoughts:
Since it’s hard coded, maybe a mention in the manual about any hard coded exclusions like this could be useful to someone in the future. Or perhaps any hard coded exclusions could be made into a user-configurable “Global exclusion” option in the web interface. Or maybe just eliminate it entirely out of code, set it as a default “Excluded files (with wildcards)” for the default group on new UrBackup installations, mention it in the manual, and let the administrators wreak havoc on their own systems with their own exclusions.
(Probably easiest just to mention the hard coded exclusions in the manual. )
A million thanks for your help and all of your hard work!
)