Back up NFS file systems

The Tivoli® Storage Manager Backup-Archive Client can be configured to protect files which are accessed with the Network File System (NFS) protocol.

Backup performance is better when you install the Backup-Archive Client where the file system physically resides, but sometimes it is necessary to access file systems using NFS for purposes of backup and recovery. The Tivoli Storage Manager UNIX and Linux backup-archive client can back up, archive, restore and retrieve file data using an NFS mount. This includes all versions of the NFS protocol, including NFS Version 2, NFS Version 3, and NFS Version 4.

The NFS Version 4 protocol allows for the export of access control lists (ACL) with NFS. As shown in the following table, some of the backup-archive clients provide support to back up and restore ACL information on data accessed using NFS. Note that the NFS Version 4 protocol must be installed on both the NFS client and NFS server in order to backup and restore ACL data.

Table 1. Network File System (NFS) ACL support
Tivoli Storage Manager Backup-Archive Client platform	ACL Support for data accessed using NFS Version 4
AIX® 6.1 or later	yes

On other operating systems the Backup-Archive Client cannot protect native ACL on data accessed using NFS.

The following restrictions apply when using the Backup-Archive Client to protect data on NFS-mounted disks:

Tivoli Storage Manager backup-archive clients cannot perform image backups of NFS-mounted disks.
Tivoli Storage Manager AIX clients cannot perform snapshot-based file backups or archive files on NFS-mounted disks.
Tivoli Storage Manager backup-archive AIX clients cannot perform journal-based backups on of files on NFS-mounted disks.
Tivoli Storage Manager backup-archive clients might not be able to backup NetApp volume snapshots if they are accessed using NFS protocol. If the NetApp filer provides different device identifiers for its volume snapshots, these snapshots might be excluded from backups; the behavior depends on the OS version, the NetApp Filer version and its settings.