Backing up CIFS shares

This is likely a surprise to you.  Most people might ask why are you doing this?  Doesn’t everybody know how to do this or have a method already?  But in fact with discussions with customers it turns out that not everyone knows how to do this.  So here we go.

This is good info for DataGravity Customers too since they will have CIFS shares, and while DG provides a way to back them up, there is no way to easily move those backups off the array - not yet as we are a 1.0 product.

Here is some info on backing up CIFS shares depending on product

NetBackup - How to back up CIFS shares on Windows with NetBackup

Backup Exec 2012 - Configuring share level backup jobs in Backup Exec 2012 - I like Backup Exec and got a trial copy and wanted to use this article to help me get CIFS backup working so I could do an article on it.  However this article doesn’t work with with Backup Exec 2014 and as a Trial User you don’t get support.

Arcserve - Information on the different Backup Storage types used in D2D on Linux - this is for the Linux version of Arcserve.

Arcserve - Protecting CIFS volumes with arcserve/Enterprise Backup

Windows Backup - One exception is the Windows Backup in Windows Server 2012.  I was impressed with how far that app has come but no way to backup a CIFS share.

Veeam - Veeam can do a file copy job of a CIFS share.  It is limited as it has no dedupe or compression but it works.  I cannot seem to share a Veeam document link as they are session tokenized I think, but check page 518 of the user guide (thanks to AJ for the reminder on this).

Commvault Simpana - you can use a FS agent in a VM and backup a CIFS share that is connected or local to that VM.  I do not have a link for this but I hope the idea helps.

If anyone knows of anything to add or change in this list let me know.

Thanks for reading, and if you have questions or comments do not hesitate to let me know.

Michael

=== END ===