Backup (Déjà Dup) needs to run with root permissions in Precise

[Paul W Panish]

Backup with Déjà Dup fails on numerous files due to r/w permissions for root only (600). It appears that starting with Precise (12.04) many systm files have changed permissions from earlier releases. Backup is no longer effective unless run with root permissions.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Simon Déziel (sdeziel)]

While I'm not sure running the backup as root is the way to go, reducing the noise of the report would be a good start IMO.

To do that, being able to exclude *files* would help a lot. The current exclusion mechanism only allows to exclude folders. This means that a user backing up /etc will always be notified of failure to backup example: /etc/shadow.

[Paul W Panish (ppanish)]

I'm also not convinced that running as root would be advisable. I think the question here is why the situation changed from 11.10 to 12.04. I suspect the problem is not actually with Déjà Dup, but with a change in permissions with how diverse files are generated. I would have preferred to file this as a system bug, but the only clear module to report against was the backup utilities.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

The change was that Deja Dup now reports such failures to the user. I had originally not reported them because of cases like /etc/shadow, where it would just be noise. But I had several cases where users thought they had backed something up (like another user's home folder), never received a notification that it wasn't actually backed up, and when they went to restore, got very sad.

So given the two, I'd prefer to make life a little more naggy than have people lose data. I'm sure there's a better middle solution, like allowing to ignore files as well as folders...

[Paul W Panish (ppanish)]

Michael, thanks for the information.

In that case I agree that file exclusion would be useful. As it is I'll just add some more directories to the exclusion list, and change a few file permissions to work around the issue.

[Bachi (m-bachmann)]

Well if Deja Dup is Ubuntu's general / packaged backup solution and it can not backup system files, then Ubuntu is by default not able to to proper system backups, only user data backups. Which is a really big limitation.

I would strongly recommend to add the ability to backup vital system folders like /etc or /var (or those files in the user's home that are owned by root). Without, Ubuntu users are way behind other OS' capabilities in terms of system backups (of course one can solve this by a manually set up backup - but what's then the point in having a bundled backup solution?)

As for security, you could make backing up root files an option, which requires an encryption password to be set.