The Road to Ubuntu - Backup Hell

Adam Turner
Tuesday, 23 October 2007 13:09

Opinion and Analysis

I realised the FAT32 partition and PCMCIA SD card reader don't automatically mount when Ubuntu boots, which is a surprise coming from Windows World. From what I can tell, they should automount but it seems to be random. I'm using a SanDisk 6-in-1 PC Card Adapter (model SDAD-67) and an el cheapo Dick Smith 60x SD card, which I bought with a digital camera. I found a way to automatically mount the FAT32 partition and two partitions on my network drive, by editing the /etc/fstab file. It's still pot luck as to whether Ubuntu recognises the PCMCIA card reader - often it doesn't even show up if I type "sudo fdsik -l" at the command line. When the PCMCIA card decides to work, I've noticed Ubuntu says it contains 400MB of data with 0 bytes free, regardless of how much free space there is.

As a compromise I decided to run backups just to my network drive, until I get the PCMCIA card problem sorted. Obviously you're going to run into problems like this switching operating systems - Vista has it's fair share of driver issues as well. I decided to persevere.

Anyway, trying to backup to the network drive created a whole new set of problems. I had to tweak the fstab file so I could get read/write permissions on the two network partitions. Searching the web reveals several different ways to do this, and I settled on;

/dev/sda5 /windows/data vfat  defaults,rw,umask=000 0 0
//hyperspace/Public /windows/Public smbfs username=guest,password= 0 0
//hyperspace/Beacon /windows/Beacon smbfs username=guest,password= 0 0

Unfortunately things are now very unstable when I'm accessing the network drives and I've managed to crash Ubuntu several times (something I was hoping to leave behind with Windows). I suspect it's to do with this fstab entry, but I don't know enough to fix it.

As if this wasn't frustrating enough, I still can't get rsync, rsnapshot or Unison to work properly. They complain about the permissions and owners on the network drive folders. I've trawled the web looking for solutions but nothing seems to do the trick. There are some good backup guides out there, but none of them take into account that fact you'll be using network or external drives - which is crazy because that's where you're most likely to want to back up data. Sometimes the backups appear to work but still throw up a string of errors, which isn't very comforting.

Coming from Windows World, all this messing around with mounting drives, setting folder permissions and dealing with complicated admin rights such as "root" is enough to bake your noodle. Once I get over this hurdle I think things should get easier, but meanwhile I'm stuck. I've scoured the web for solutions but nothing quite does the job and I'm out of ideas. Little help?

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