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Support of Hardlinks on SMB shares


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Posted

Hi,

 

I have edited the smb.conf file and changed unix extensions from "no" to "yes" and restarted Samba but without success.

Using a Backup Software that utilizes hardlinks (based on rsync) I still get the message "target file system does not support hardlinks".

 

On this server I am using unRAID 5.06. Is it possible to enable hardlinks on SMB shares with this release?

 

Thanks a lot!

 

Cheers,

Marcel

Posted

Hi,

 

I have edited the smb.conf file and changed unix extensions from "no" to "yes" and restarted Samba but without success.

Using a Backup Software that utilizes hardlinks (based on rsync) I still get the message "target file system does not support hardlinks".

 

On this server I am using unRAID 5.06. Is it possible to enable hardlinks on SMB shares with this release?

 

Thanks a lot!

 

Cheers,

Marcel

No - you cannot use hard links on User shares (in any unRAID release).  This is because the User Share system is built on FUSE, and FUSE does not support hard links.
Posted

Thanks a lot for the super quick answer!

 

As far as I know, FUSE does support hard links. So I assume the file system implementation in unRAID (based on FUSE) just does not implement them (?).

 

Are there any plans to change that?

 

Hard links are an extremely useful feature when it comes to daily or even hourly backups of a working directory with large numbers of files.

I use HardlinkBackup to get a folder with the relative time stamp for each backup containing all the files of my project - but without them taking up giant amounts of space since or backups taking forever since only modified files are being copied.

This makes restores extremely quick and convenient.

 

With storage server being one of the main use cases for unRAID it would make sense to implement hard links (unless there is some trouble or caveat about it).

Posted

Worked like a charm. Thanks a lot!!

 

I'll write a feature request for hard links to be implemented on the user shares (FUSE based file system) since user shares are to be preferred.

 

The backup software (on Windows) had one more complaint, saying that the target file system does not support file creation times. When I checked the results it seemed all files got the same value for last change and created.

 

Is there a solution for this as well?

 

Thanks!

Posted

I'll write a feature request for hard links to be implemented on the user shares (FUSE based file system) since user shares are to be preferred.

I think this limitation is due to the fact that in unRAID a User Share can span multiple disks, and under Linux hard links are normally constrained to files on the same physical device.  I guess there might be a way to do it in unRAID if the hard link is constrained to the same physical device where the file linked to resides, but I am not sure.
Posted

I'll write a feature request for hard links to be implemented on the user shares (FUSE based file system) since user shares are to be preferred.

 

I wanted to make it clear though, that all development of new features will probably be on the 6.3 branch, nothing less.  There's no chance it will be added to v5, or even 6.1.

Posted

That is what I had assumed. Actually I can follow itimpis's point about hard links on user shares being a hassle since user shares can span multiple drives. @RobJ: can you confirm this being the issue?

 

Is there any information about the issue with the file creation time I had mentioned?

 

Thanks!

Posted

That is what I had assumed. Actually I can follow itimpis's point about hard links on user shares being a hassle since user shares can span multiple drives. @RobJ: can you confirm this being the issue?

I'm sorry, I don't know.

Posted

Worked like a charm. Thanks a lot!!

 

I'll write a feature request for hard links to be implemented on the user shares (FUSE based file system) since user shares are to be preferred.

 

The backup software (on Windows) had one more complaint, saying that the target file system does not support file creation times. When I checked the results it seemed all files got the same value for last change and created.

 

Is there a solution for this as well?

 

Thanks!

 

I found this post while searching before I made my own request. Did you make a feature request yet? I didn't see the post if you did and I didn't want to make a duplicate.

Posted

based on itimpis point about user shares potentially spanning multiple drives I refrained from a feature request so far.

With the workaround (using a disk share for this) being available I thought there are more urgent things for the time being.

Posted

Concerning hard links and FUSE, Tom just made this statement (here):

fuse/shfs does support symlinks but not hard links.

 

???

I've seen numerous pages stating otherwise. Unless I'm missing something, which is entirely possible.

Posted

as far as I am concerned (and as I had posted earlier), FUSE does support hardlinks.

 

And as was suggested in this thread (and successfully tried by myself), using a disk share, they work fine with unRAID.

 

regarding the support of hard links by FUSE see this link...

https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/classes/hmc.cs135.201109/homework/fuse/fuse_doc.html

 

I'm not too familiar with FUSE but I made a comment about it on the thread for the new RC that was just mentioned. FUSE does, as far as I know but it has to be implemented. Tom said SHFS does not, which is likely the limiting factor. However, my understanding is SHFS stopped development in 2004 and has been superseded by SSHFS, which does support hardlinking. I mentioned that in the thread so I am waiting to see what Tom has to say about it.

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