Hello everybody,

After a lot of Googleing, I decided to finally post a question here.

I got Samba working on my Mandrake 9.2 machine and I need to back up a whole NTFS drive to it.
My problem is that I can't figure out how to set up the share so that NTFS file permissions are preserved.
It did cross my mind that it may not be possible, but knowing what I know about Linux, it seems very unlikely. There has to be a way.

As an additional clue, I am trying to backup the PDC (win nt server), so that I have an emergency restore that's not a tape.
Ghosting the server is not an option, as it needs to stay up.
So I would really like to do a simple file copy to the Samba share.
In case I need to restore the files, I must have the original permissions.

Thank you for reading.

Regards.

if you can use cp use cp -dpR to preserve ownership and perms.

As windows and inux use different permission systems you would probably not be able to preserve the NTFS permissions.
My suggestion is to back it up to one file one the Samba share.
This could be done in a multitude of way, among them back up to a single compressed archive (zip, rar...) or using a real backup program. I would go with the backup program as that would do a more detailed backup taking in consideration the windows environment fully.

The only way this would be even remotely possible is if you mounted your drive on the Samba machine as -t ntfs (or whatever the Linux driver calls it). The last I heard, the write capabilities of Open Source NTFS support was highly experimental and very likely to corrupt your data. In addition, I'm not sure if Samba even preserves NTFS permissions any way, so that might be a Samba limitation (in addition to the fact that Linux file systems cannot represent the permissions assigned to NTFS partitions).

Gentlemen,

I could have sworn I posted a reply!

Well, I wanted to thank you all for your replies. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do it with Linux so I had to temporarily install windoze to copy the files with permissions. &^$####%

Thanks again for your advice.