In addition to its core component, Samba comes with a bunch ofpretty powerful ancillary utilities: an SMB client, an SMB filesystemmounter, a backup tool, and a Web-based administration utility. Find outhow you can use them, inside.
Samba also comes with the "smbtar" utility, which is expressly designed to simplify the process of backing up shares across a network. You can back up (and restore) a shared folder on a Windows workstation using the "smbtar" command, as demonstrated in the following example:
$ /usr/local/samba/bin/smbtar -v -s clubhouse -x music
server is clubhouse
share is music\
tar args is
tape is tar.out
blocksize is
added interface ip=192.168.3.1 bcast=192.168.3.255 nmask=255.255.255.0
added interface ip=192.168.0.77 bcast=192.168.0.255 nmask=255.255.255.0
Got a positive name query response from 192.168.0.143 ( 192.168.0.143 )
tarmode is now full, system, hidden, noreset, verbose
In this case, the "smbtar" utility creates a TAR archive of the files located at the share "//clubhouse/music", and stores the result in a file named "tar.out".
By default, the "smbtar" utility looks for a share named "backup" on the specified SMB server. This makes it easy to schedule regular backups of Windows workstations in an office environment - simply ask each user to create a share named "backup" on their individual workstations containing the files they'd like to have archived, and run a script on the server at regular intervals (via cron) to connect to each workstation, look for a share named "backup", and - if it exists - archive its contents to a TAR file.