Receiving permission error when using a CIFS mount for backups

Symptoms

A backup or restore job may fail with similar permission errors:

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

Description 

Please note that we strongly advise against using CIFS or any other network mount as a destination for your backups. This is due to the fact that cPanel & WHM does not officially support nor test with these types of network-drives, as such, functionality is not guaranteed when using such configurations.

With that said, when using CIFS, if you encounter similar permission errors, the problem is likely to be due to missing attributes for the network-drive

Workaround

1) Using your preferred text editor, edit the /etc/fstab file so that the CIFS-mounted drive uses the user_xattr option. This will resemble the following example:

//192.0.2.0/mybackup /backup cifs user,uid=500,rw,suid,credentials=/root/.cifs,user_xattr 0 0

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

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

Note: If the CIFS-mount does not support extended attributes, you will encounter the following error message 

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

For more information, you may refer to our documentation.