Hola,

Is there a particular reason why you advice against NFS? Just out of curiousity. Have you encountered problems with it?

Kind regards,

Eric

Yes. I've had problems with it even under Linux (but that's another story).

Bear in mind however that all I talk about applies only to xp and below, I have no idea what the status of the nfs support for vista and seven is.

I've used it in the past and found it to be a bit weak and unstable, I've also had problems with utf8 encodings (no idea if this has changed).

But the main thing is that samba/cifs is just easier to handle and better integrated in Windows for my tastes. For nfs you have to install additional software while the smb/cifs stuff will just work out of the box. Not that samba hasn't its own assortment of problems, but most of them are either fixed or at least mitigated by the newer cifs.

I'll admit that I haven't used cifs a lot though, since I don't own any windows based machine nowadays.

Hi i92guboj,

Thanks for sharing that

Kind regards,

Eric

Thanks for reply. I just had one more question about samba. I am not security expert. I was told it should be used only for local trusted file sharing because it is unencrypted. Does this mean that it is possible for someone to intercept my files as I upload them? I would prefer to prevent this from happening as some files might contain private information that I don't want others to see.

If you are paranoid about security, then use ssh and WinSCP.

Samba is intended for use in local networks where you can trust the users and/or the privacy is not a concern.

You can always tighten the configuration a bit and tie it even more using iptables though.

If you have data that changes infrequently and don't mind backing up manually; as per the previous poster WinSCP is definitely the way to go.

You could initiate your backup from your Linux server; by NFS/CIFS sharing the Windows/Linux dual boot machine (you'd need to configure an NFS share on the Linux partitions and on the Windows side enable sharing of the Windows partition). Thereafter on your server you could mount the mount the shares and thereafter have a script of some sort that initiates a simple compress and move of the data to the server's hard disk.

If this all backup thing is in your local network, then you can synchronize using rsync, Union, or simply use SAMBA for file sharing with windows. Your internal network should most probably be under your protection.