Hi everybody!

I have a mail server running on Redhat and an another machine with Windows 2008 Server.

Lately I tried backing up my mail server data on the Windows share by mounting the shared folder as cifs system.

I tried cp as well as rsync, all goes well but the symbolic links could not be copied and "symbolic links not supported" message is flashed. Finally, the transfer fails with so many errors.

Any suggestions about how to go for it?

Thanks

The Windows filesystem will not support symbolic links, hence the message, "symbolic links not supported".

1 members found this post helpful.

Ya...I googled a lot and could find the same thing. Just to be sure, is there any other way by which I could take a proper backup of the folder on the share.

Thanks

Not a "proper" backup - i.e., one that could be used to restore the original. Symlinks are not the only problem for a proper backup, I am sure that ownerships and permission would also come into play for a mail server.

With rsync you could use the --copy-links option to save the link targets instead of the links themselves, but that might be a bad idea both from a security and storage size perspective. For example, symlinks that pointed to password or other configs would be copied, and directories referred from multiple locations would be copied to each of those locations in the backup.

Probably the best option would be to create a tar archive as the backup, which could include symbolic links, then copy that to the Windows machine.

While using cp, I used -p to preserve the permissions of the files.

In one of the threads in the forum, I read about using NFS for mounting 2k8 filesystem in CentOS. Do we have the same "symbolic link" problem in NFS also? As far as I know, NFS is used for sharing in non-window environment.

NFS is used for mounting Unix/Linux filesystems across a network. I am not aware whether Windows would support that as either a client or server.

But the problem is not in how the shared directory is mounted, it is the problem that the underlying filesystem itself does not support symlinks, ownerships and permissions.

So whether you mount it via NFS, CIFS, Samba, etc... the Windows filesystem simply is not capable of storing the symlinks and other file attributes.

Using cp -p may not have complained, but I am sure the ownerships and permissions were not stored on the Windows machine. You may want to check that so that you do not assume that you have more information stored than you really do.

As far as I know the only way to backup a Linux filesystem to a Windows filesystem then restore it with symlinks and other attributes intact would be to first archive it (i.e. tar) then save the archive to the Windows machine.

Hope that helps.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks astrogeek. Will try to backup by archiving as suggested by you. Many thanks!

You are welcome!