[Rdiff-backup-bugs] [bug #19034] Fatal ListError when trying to mirror / as a non-root user

[Stephan Sokolow]

URL:
  <http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?19034>

                 Summary: Fatal ListError when trying to mirror / as a
non-root user
                 Project: rdiff-backup
            Submitted by: ssokolow
            Submitted on: Monday 02/12/2007 at 00:30
                Category: None
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: None
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

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Details:

It seems that unlike rsync, rdiff-backup 1.0.5 crashes and burns when it runs
into a directory it cannot traverse. (When, not if. On a UNIX-like system,
"Permission denied" should never be fatal to a tool that walks the
filesystem.)

For example...
address@hidden ~ $ rdiff-backup / /srv/backups/test/
ListError root [Errno 13] Permission denied
address@hidden ~ $ rdiff-backup --exclude /root / /srv/backups/test/
ListError root [Errno 13] Permission denied
address@hidden ~ $

Not only does this make me very suspicious (how trustworthy could a backup
tool which such a simple problem be?), it absolutely prevents me from
switching for the following reasons:

1. It could be 6 months before I have time to fix the problem myself and I'm
not going to risk having a scheduled backup die because I increased the
security on some random directory that is already in the
--exclude-globbing-filelist.

2. My backup solution specifies that /srv/backups/<hostname>/ on the chosen
backup machine must contain a from-the-root mirror of the given machine. On a
related note, this is something that rsync makes trivial for backups that
aren't started from the root via the -R option. rdiff-backup 1.0.5 seems to
offer no such alternative so I can't even use it for portions of my backup
tree.





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