I am one day into my trial of Cloudberry Backup Personal for Linux, and am impressed so far. This is one of three posts regarding problems I'm encountering.

Although the product is clearly intended to do comprehensive backups of Linux computers, unless I am missing something it is unable to do this out-of-the-box because the backup process does not have access to all the files that need to be backed up.

My system backup includes /home, /u01 (a place where I have large application files), /etc, /opt, some /var subdirectories and others. Many of these files are not readable except by root. When running a backup plan created in the CBB UI, errors occur trying to access those files.

I found many posts online about this problem, most from several years ago. The solution is to change the owner of the backup plan files:

sudo chown root:root /opt/local/Online\ Backup/*/plans/*
sudo systemctl restart cloudberry-backup

This works for me, but it is obviously an error-prone process. It is easy to forget this step. And if there are different backup plans for different users with different permissions, it becomes more difficult because the backup plan files must be reconfigured individually and their filenames are long and complex.

The same issue occurs for restore plans. And there it's a little worse, since most restore plans are ad-hoc -- you might right-click on a file in a backup in the "Backup Storage" section and select restore, fill in the blanks, and let it run rather than saving it. But that won't work if the restoring user does not have access to the files. Instead, the restore plan has to be saved and its owner changed as above before it is run.

My suggested solution: A "Run as user" option in the specification of backup and restore plans. When a user specifies a different user, CBB would confirm that the user has administrative privileges by requesting the root password or, using kdesu or its equivalent, the user's own password, like YaST does. CBB would then take care of giving the backup or restore plan the right owner.

A similar situation applies with backup targets. The user creating a storage account in the file system may not have access to that location, even though the backup will eventually have access. Again, CBB can allow "Run as user" and verify administrative privileges.

One post from four years ago said that developers were already planning this feature. Did it ever get implemented? Or is there something else I'm missing? Thanks.