Soft mounts may cause silent data corruption (it's actually the applications which don't check the return code on file system operations which cause the corrupt

Soft mounts may cause silent data corruption (it's actually the applications which don't check the return code on file system operations which cause the corruption, but there are just too many of those). Just don't do it. People sometimes (ignorantly and irresponsibly) recommend (or have recommended -- NFS is squarely in the legacy corner of technology) soft mounts in an attempt to deal with unreliable servers, i.e. prevent clients from 'hanging' if the server doesn't respond. The real solution is of course to fix the darn server / the network.