Troubleshooting CIFS share backup failures

I recently had an issue at a customer site whereby they were unable to backup CIFS shares. After some investigating it turned out that the backups were failing as nsrexecd did not have permissions to access the CIFS path.

Generally, nsrexecd starts as a service on a windows system under the SYSTEM account which normally does not have the correct security credentials to access the CIFS share.

Error Messages

You may see the following messages during failure:

Error: "No full backups of this save set were found in the media database; performing a full backup"

Error: "No such file for directory"
Error: " : Failed with error(s)"

Procedure

To resolve this issue, I used the following procedure:

  1. Create an account on the NetWorker client with the same username and password as an account with permissions to the CIFS shares.
  2. Perform one of the following backup operations:
    1. Backup the CIFS shares saveset:
      1. Edit the Client resource for the NetWorker client that is backing up the CIFS share:
        1. In the Remote User attribute, enter the username from step 1.
        2. In the Password attribute, enter the password from step 1.
      2. Use the savegrp command to backup the CIFS shares saveset from the command line. For example:
        # savegrp client_name -G group_name
    2. Backup the CIFS shares:
      1. Make sure that the NetWorker client is connected to the CIFS share. For example, run a command shell that:
        1. Has a mapped share with net use \\IP_address\share.
        2. Is connected with the username and password that has access to the CIFS share.
      2. Use the save -L command to backup the CIFS shares. For example:
        # save -L