Mounting SMB Shares

TrueNAS General
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1

I would like to back up a Linux PC I own to my TrueNAS Scale instance via Pika Backup.

I have created an SMB share, and it works wonderfully in Dolphin, which accesses it under smb://truenas.local/sharename/. Reading and writing both work.

When I try to use this URL in Pika Backup, however, it gives me a “Location is not mountable” error, which I don’t quite understand. I have searched previous posts here, on Reddit, and on other forums but found nothing relevant to this exact issue.

By default I access my TrueNAS instance via Tailscale as truenas-scale, so I tried smb://truenas-scale/sharename/ under the assumption that Dolphin is doing something odd, but this did not help.

I’m not sure if I set up the SMB share incorrectly or what the issue is exactly. Is Dolphin covering for a misconfiguration on my part? Is Pika Backup the issue? What can I do to narrow down the problem?

I’m pretty new to networking and network shares, so I’m a bit stuck at the moment.

2

Can you try using the IP address instead of the name of your TrueNAS?

3

Oh, yeah, forgot to mention, I did that. Still the same error.

I also tried adding a username, both truenas_admin and the one for an extra user I set up that owns the share, as Pika says it should be formatted like smb://user@server.example.org/files/backup, but that didn’t help either.

4

Did you activate the “SMB user” option for the user you created?

5

The checkbox at the bottom right of the “Edit User” panel? Yeah, that’s active.

6

It may be that Pika Backup can’t backup to an SMB path and instead needs a local path.

Try installing sudo apt install cifs-utils

then sudo mkdir -p /mnt/truenas_backup

then sudo mount -t cifs //truenas.local/sharename /mnt/truenas_backup
-o username=youruser

and point Pika at /mnt/truenas_backup

7

So, that did work as a fix, but also you just helped me find out what the actual problem is!

I assumed it was an error with how I set up SMB, but actually for SMB support Pika needs the gvfs-smb package installed, it just never says that anywhere. So I installed that and now everything works.

Still, had that not worked, your solution would’ve been a little hacky but done the job, and it pointed me to where the issue was, so thank you!

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