For all of you out there using Google (or whatever your favorite search engine) to try to find a solution to archive bit madness with Samba, I have a workaround for you. Call it a solution if you want to, because it will solve the problem regardless of whether it is an application or Samba issue. Prerequisites: 1) You must have the the acl packages installed 2) user_xattr and acl must be set on the volume where your Samba shares reside in fstab 3) The time stamp for file modification must be updated when modified even when the archive bit is not being set (verify this by using stat -c %y foo.txt) Resolution: Add this command to a nightly cron to run BEFORE your backups (run as root): find /share/ -name '*' -mtime 0 -exec setfattr --name=user.DOSATTRIB --value=0x30783230 {} \; Replace /share/ with whatever the path to the root of your Samba share directory where all of your shares are located. This SHOULD set the archive bit properly for files modified within the past 24 hours. Make sure that the user account your backup software uses has full access to all files and folders. If you are having trouble as I was with the archive bit, I hope you find this and it solves your problem. Thanks to all that helped me with this issue. If anyone sees an error in the above, please follow up with a correction. Thanks, Aaron Kincer