For about a week now I’ve been wrestling with implementing a system where CrashPlan would backup to my network drive. I ran into a really bit problem: When you mount a network location in Gnome using the GUI (gvfs), root can’t access it. Since the CrashPlan engine runs at root, it makes the network location unusable as a backup destination.
After a while of working on different ways to solve this rather large hurdle, I came up with the idea of simply mounting the network location using smbmount (mount.cifs). After some testing and tweaking, I was able to get it successfully working and added an entry to fstab to have it mount at boot time. I chose /mnt/mynas as the mount point.
See Synology DiskStation and Samba mount permissions for my method of getting it mounted with the correct file permissions.
Once it was set to mount at boot-time, I can now open the CrashPlan client and set /mnt/mynas as a destination folder, and now I have both local and off-site backups!
Feel free to share your thoughts and/or feedback in the comments below!
#1 by Robert on January 27, 2012 - 5:26 pm
Thank you very much for the hint!