Avamar: How to Restore CIFS Share from NDMP Backup While Preserving Inheritance

Summary: When restoring CIFS data from an Avamar NDMP backup, the original file permissions—including owner, group, and ACLs—are reapplied, overriding Windows inheritance settings. To enforce inheritance during restore, add --ignoreacls to the avtar.cmd file on the restore client. Without this, restored files may not reflect updated parent directory permissions, requiring manual intervention. ...

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Instructions

Enable inheritance for CIFS restores using NDMP.

Prerequisites

  • Access to the Avamar client host that performs the restore.
  • Backup Agent service running under a user with Domain Admin privileges.

Procedure

  • Locate the avtar.cmd file for the restore client.
  • If the file does not exist, create it.
  • Add a line containing --ignoreacls on its own line.
  • Save the file and verify that the Backup Agent service is running.

File path

/usr/local/avamar/var/[CLIENT_NAME]/avtar.cmd

 

Example steps

# Replace [CLIENT_NAME] with the actual client name
cd /usr/local/avamar/var/[CLIENT_NAME]

# Create avtar.cmd if it does not exist
if [ ! -f avtar.cmd ]; then
    touch avtar.cmd
fi

# Append the ignoreacls option
echo "--ignoreacls" >> avtar.cmd

# Verify the Backup Agent service runs as Domain Admin
systemctl status avamar-backup-agent

 

Warning: Adding --ignoreacls overrides the ACLs saved in the backup. Ensure this is the wanted behavior before proceeding.
Caution: The Backup Agent service must run under a Domain Admin account; otherwise the restore may fail to apply the new ACL inheritance.

Affected Products

Avamar Plug-in for NDMP
Article Properties
Article Number: 000211049
Article Type: How To
Last Modified: 16 Oct 2025
Version:  2
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