How To:Backup Partitions Mounted via NFS

Notes from my NFS troubleshooting

We recently got a SnapServer on our network and wanted to use our existing Amanda install to back it up via NFS. After several attempts and banging my head against the wall, I reached out for help on the Amanda users list. I got the following back:

"Dump works on devices, not filesystems, so it won't work on an NFS mount. Tar works on filesystems, but Amanda calls it with the option to not cross filesystem boundaries, so a backup of /nfs in your case will just give you the local files in /nfs and not mounts under /nfs. If you are trying to backup /nfs/remotedir, add /nfs/remotedir to your disklist and it will do what you want. "

Ahh... so simple, so elegant. I never knew you could just add directories to the disklist. For years we added and removed various machines, always defining the actual /dev/ device:

 machinename /dev/aacd0s2e comp-user

But... clearly you can add them by actual path name too:

 machinename  /nfs/snap comp-user-tar

If you have several nfs mounts under /nfs and want them all backed up as a single DLE, you could do a set of include directives in the dumptype. Example: Line in disklist file:

 host NFSDIRS /nfs {
   user-tar
   include file        "./rmtdir1"
   include file append "./rmtdir2" "./rmtdir3"
   include file append "./rmtdir4"
 }