Writing to NFS share leaves local copy of files
 

I'm trying to backup an old Solaris system by mounting an NFS share locally and copying files to it. I'd use rsync but it doesn't have it installed and I want to make as few changes as possible. For some reason the files are retained locally at the mount point (even after it's been unmounted) as well as being written to the remote share. Obviously this creates a problem because I can't do a backup without filling up the local disk, why is this?

We'd have to guess since you don't provide details.

A couple of possibilities:

1) The NFS directory is NOT mounted where you think it is. That is just because it is exported as say "/mypath/mydir" from one server does not necessarily mean it has to be mounted as "/mypath/mydir" on the other system - it might be mounted as "/billybob/filesystem". You'd need to show us the /etc/exports from the system you exported it on and the df output on the system you exported it to for us to tell you if we see an issue.

2) You exported a directory that has submounts and/or symbolic links on the exporting server and are trying to write to those submounts on the target server but they don't exist or point to subdirectories that are local to the server you're doing the NFS mount on.

I think I may have solved this. The script I was using used the following command to mount the NFS share:
mount -F nfs -o rw <Windows_backup_server>:/Solaris_Backups/$MachineName /mnt/Backup/
Although the backup server had a directory that corresponded to Solaris_Backups/$MachineName the MachineName subdirectory wasnn't shared, only the parent. It then issued:
mkdir -p /mnt/Backup/$MachineName/$date
(to make the directory if it doesn't already exist) and copied the files to that. Removing $MachineName from the mount command seemed to do it, though I'm still nto sure why it was writing the files lcoally.