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BackupPC is a fantastic tool for backing up all your machines. I use it to back up both Windows and Linux machines. Linux is easy, all you need is SSH and rsync, but Windows is kind of a pain. You need to use Windows shares in most every case. In the future, I’ll talk about how to use Cygwin to use SSH and rsync to backup a Windows machine.

The problem that I have, is there is a bug in Samba versions 3.6 to 4.1 that will cause the tarbackup function to stop the backup before it finished, and BackupPC will report the backup was complete. I haven’t run into this with every Windows machine, but I have in most. Generally what causes this is using another user account to login and perform the backups, instead of using the normal user account. If you backup a Windows machine using the smb method and it appears not everything is being backed up, then this is the guide you want to follow.

To start, I’m currently running Debian 7 (Wheezy) with Samba version 3.6. I tried getting Samba 4.2 to build, but several of my libraries are out of date. If you are currently running 4.0 or 4.1, you might be able to build 4.2 on your server. Otherwise, go with 3.5.22 (being the latest 3.5 series at the time of this writing). (https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10605)

There are several packages that need to be installed for this to work. Every config is different, but all I have to install was autoconf, make, and gcc.

apt-get install autoconf make gcc

Now we need to download the Samba sources and build it, but not install.

cd /opt
wget https://download.samba.org/pub/samba/stable/samba-3.5.22.tar.gz
tar -zxf samba-3.5.22.tar.gz
cd samba-3.5.22/source3/
./autogen.sh
./configure
make

That was the hard part, if Samba didn’t build correctly, you might be missing other packages. You maybe told what they are, otherwise, Google.

Now set the path for $SmbClientPath to /opt/samba-3.5.22/source3/bin/smbclient. You can either change the $SmbClientPath in your backuppc config, or just change it for hosts that are having issues. If you are reading this, I’m going to assume you know how to do that.

Now test (this will do a FULL backup, so it can take some time):

/usr/share/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_dump -v -f <computer name>

You can watch as it goes along (note that you will NOT see it running in the GUI). This can take some time, but when complete you will have an idea of if everything worked or not.

Did this work for you? Did you build Samba 4.2 or newer? Let me know in the comments.