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Files not updating, smb mounted Seagate Central NAS

Asked by Anthony Dobaj

smb-mounted Seagate Central NAS, Ubuntu 14.04
browse to the smb share in the settings -> where to save dialog, path listed as:
/run/user/1000/gvfs/smb-share:server=nas_name,share=share_name/subfolder
Nautilus accesses this drive just fine, but reports the drive path as smb://nas_name/share_name/

problem: backintime "take snapshot" says "Working" and "Done, no backup needed" but no files are transferred, but the backintime folder is created

Anybody have experience with this setup? Thx

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Germar
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Best Germar (germar) said : 		#1

It doesn't work with gvfs mounted shares. You'd need to mount the share manually for BackInTime with either cifs (run 'sudo apt-get install cifs-utils' and take a look at 'man mount.cifs') or autofs (run 'sudo apt-get install autofs' and look at 'man autofs').

But I'd rather use BackInTimes new Mode SSH to connect to your NAS. This is a lot faster and more efficient. Take a look at 'man backintime' section SSH.

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Anthony Dobaj (apdobaj) said : 		#2

Hi Germar,

Tried the SSH thing - in my setup, the Seagate NAS is connected to the LAN via the DHCP service of the router, and they give you absolutely no access to the NAS's OS. So I tried using my Windows machine as a proxy by mapping the NAS to a drive, generating the key pair, running PuTTY etc to no avail. My goal is to have BIT run automatically when connected to the LAN via wifi, right now the SSH approach feels like a big research project with not much chance of success.

So I went down the original path, used the cifs method:

sudo mount.cifs -o noperm,user=NAS_user_name,password=NAS_password //NAS_IP_addr/NAS_user /mnt/seagate-central
I can browse this mount point in Nautilus fine
where to save: /mnt/seagate-central/subfolder
BIT now works but it's quite slow, any tips to speed things up? Thx!

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Germar (germar) said : 		#3

> BIT now works but it's quite slow, any tips to speed things up? Thx!

Sure. Use Mode SSH :-D

Look at this on how to enable SSH access to your NAS:
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/006006en?language=en_US

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Anthony Dobaj (apdobaj) said : 		#4

Unfortunately I got a consumer-grade NAS from retail, they've got the OS (which they admit is some version of linux) completely locked down (specifically, there is no SSH option). If I would have known this I would have gotten a business-grade NAS. I'll see if I can get the open firmware, I'm pretty sure the hardware is the same in any case. Thanks for your help!

One caveat I would like to make clear to any readers that are trying to do this same thing is that the mount.cifs command doesn't work if the specified password has an "!" character in it, apparently the command parser has a bug. This had me tearing my hair out for a couple of hours. Thanks again!

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Anthony Dobaj (apdobaj) said : 		#5

Thanks Germar, that solved my question.