Difference between soft mount and HARD mount is listed below :

Soft Mount : Consider we have mounted a NFS share using ‘soft mount’ .When a program or application requests a file from the NFS filesystem, NFS CLIENT daemons will try to retrieve the data from the NFS server. But, if it doesn’t get any response from the NFS server (due to any CRASH or failure of NFS server), the NFS client will report an error to the process on the client machine requesting the file access. The advantage of this mechanism is “fast responsiveness” as it doesn’t wait for the NFS server to respond. But, the main disadvantage of this method is data corruption or loss of data. So, this is not a recommended option to use.

Hard Mount : Suppose we have mounted the NFS share using hard mount, it will repeatedly retry to contact the server. Once the server is BACK online the program will continue to execute undisturbed from the state where it was during server crash. We can use the mount option “intr” which ALLOWS NFS requests to be interrupted if the server goes down or cannot be reached. Hence the recommended settings are hard and intr options.

Difference between soft mount and hard mount is listed below :

Soft Mount : Consider we have mounted a NFS share using ‘soft mount’ .When a program or application requests a file from the NFS filesystem, NFS client daemons will try to retrieve the data from the NFS server. But, if it doesn’t get any response from the NFS server (due to any crash or failure of NFS server), the NFS client will report an error to the process on the client machine requesting the file access. The advantage of this mechanism is “fast responsiveness” as it doesn’t wait for the NFS server to respond. But, the main disadvantage of this method is data corruption or loss of data. So, this is not a recommended option to use.

Hard Mount : Suppose we have mounted the NFS share using hard mount, it will repeatedly retry to contact the server. Once the server is back online the program will continue to execute undisturbed from the state where it was during server crash. We can use the mount option “intr” which allows NFS requests to be interrupted if the server goes down or cannot be reached. Hence the recommended settings are hard and intr options.