I am running crashplan+ on Ubuntu 10.04 and I noticed an issue.

I am backing up my computer to 2 locations.
The first being their online servers. That works fine.

The second location is a folder.

This is where the issue is.

If the mount point is /media/sg160 and crashplan stores the files in /media/sg160/crashplan everything works fine if the drive is connected.

The problem is if the drive is a removable drive or a network drive that for some reason currently is not accessible rather then generating an error and not running the backup it creates the directory crashplan under the directory /media/sg160/ and starts a fresh backup storing the backup under the new directory.

By the look at the crashplan forum this has been an ongoing issue for over a year and so far no fix.

The only work around I could find was a creating a shell script that turns off crashplan if the drive is unaccessible. The only problem is that also turns off the other backup to crashplan server.

Has any one come up with a work around for the problem?

How about if you make the /media/sg160 with permissions of 400, then when sg160 is available it will mount over the directory and if sg160 is not available then crashplan will not be able to write to the directory.

Andrew,

I tried something similar this morning. I used 444 and for some reason I could not see the files in the directory.

So the question is:
If I make the mountpoint /media/sg160/ 444 How do I make the files on the drive readable and writable with a permission like 777?

the line in my fstab for the removable drive which is ext3 is

/dev/sdb1 /media/sg160 ext3 defaults 0 2

Andrew,

I tried your solution this morning and this time when I reduced the permission on the directory the drive mounted and I was able to see the drives files. So I don't know what happed yesterday.

The problem is now with reduced permissions the directory is still writable by root. I set the directory to 400 and root could still write to it.

create a soft link to /dev/null