Backing up Samba share to USB jump drive?

[Bill Moran]

L Goodwin <xrayv19 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Here's another round of dumb questions for ya:
> 
> Can USB jump drives be used to back-up a Samba share?
> If so, what do I need to do to prepare the USB drive
> to accept files? 
> Since I don't really need to compress or encrypt, I
> was thinking about simply copying the entire directory
> tree using the cp command, instead of using dump, tar,
> cpio.
> Will this work, and is it a "good idea"?

Sure.

> The filesystem to be backed up is a single common UFS
> shared via Samba. All PC users have access to the same
> set of files (no user-specific directories). The files
> to be backed up are Word, Excel, PDF, etc.

Every jump drive I've seen comes pre-formatted as FAT-32.  The only
problem with this is you'll lose POSIX file permissions when you copy
the files.  If you're not using the file permissions, then it isn't
a problem.

> I don't want to buy the drives until I know if it will
> work and how to do it. Do I need to UFS format the
> drives? I assume the drive will have to be mounted
> like any other drive...

It's your choice.  You can leave the drive formatted FAT-32 for compat
with other OSen, or you can newfs it to a ufs filesystem to maintain
unix-style file permissions.

In my experience, jump drives behave just like any other drive.

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com