How to Resolve CIFS-mounted Backup Drive Permissions Errors

Overview

When you attempt to perform a backup to a Common Internet File System (CIFS)-mounted drive, you may receive errors that resemble the following example:

/bin/cp: failed to preserve ownership for `': Permission denied /bin/cp: failed to preserve ownership for `': Permission denied

These Permission denied errors may result from missing extended attributes on the CIFS-mounted drive.

Resolve the error

To resolve the permission denied errors for the CIFS-mounted drive, perform the following steps:

1. Edit the /etc/fstab file so that the CIFS-mounted drive uses the user_xattr option. This will resemble the following example:

   1 2 3 4

   /dev/mapper/centos_centos--7--clone-root / xfs defaults 1 1 UUID=01c6e08e-bbd1-4046-af48-beaf233746d4 /boot xfs defaults 1 2 /dev/mapper/centos_centos--7--clone-swap swap swap defaults 0 0 //192.0.2.0/mybackup /backup cifs user,uid=500,rw,suid,credentials=/root/.cifs,user_xattr 0 0

   In this example, line 4 displays the CIFS-mounted drive entry.

   • The local user owns the mounted files.
   • The CIFS drive’s access credentials reside in the /root/.cifs file.
     Important:

     We strongly recommend that you store your CIFS-mounted drive’s access credentials in a separate, secure file.

2. Run the remount mount command to remount the CIFS-mounted drive.

3. Run the lsattr /CIFS_mount command to add the extended attributes.

   Important:

   The mount does not support extended attributes if the lsattr /CIFS_mount command returns the following error:

   Error means not available: lsattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device While reading flags on ...