[rdiff-backup-users] Permissions and gid wrong on local copying on Mac OS X

[Attila Szegedi]

Hi,

I have a problem that's manifesting itself with both rdiff-backup 1.0.3  
and 1.1.5 on Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.3. I also have xattrs installed from  
<http://pythonmac.org/packages/xattr-0.2-py2.4-macosx10.4.zip>, if that  
information helps. Now, the problem is as follows: I have an external  
FireWire HDD mounted as /Volumes/Backup, and am backing up from and to  
identical filesystems (HFS+, case insensitive, journaled)

# sudo rdiff-backup /Applications /Volumes/Backup/Applications

will produce

drwx------   2 root  aszegedi  68 Jan  3 23:41 Applications

whereas the original was

drwxrwxr-x   64 root      admin     2176 Mar 31  2005 Applications

(don't bother with file sizes - I stopped it before it finished)

So, the group and the mode of the created directory is plain bad. Also,  
all content inside directory is also drwx------ and with same owner/group.
What's even more interesting is that if I copy a directory named "test"  
from my home directory:

# sudo rdiff-backup ~/test /Volumes/Backup/test

it will perfectly move the uid/gid and access mode. *Even* if I try to  
make it as similar to Applications as possible (that is, I do chown root  
and chgrp admin and chmod 775 on it first). *Even* if I move it to / first  
and then do

# sudo rm -r /Volumes/Backup/test
# sudo rdiff-backup /test /Volumes/Backup/test

Even tried renaming test to Test, and then doing the rdiff-backup, and it  
still works okay. However, for /Applications (or /Developer, etc.) it  
consistently produces incorrect information. As a last resort, I tried a  
completely local copy within the local drive, thinking that maybe  
something's wrong with permissions on the FireWire drive:

# sudo rdiff-backup /Applications ~/Applications

And still the same story - the copy in my home directory also has the bad  
permissions and gid. I'm rather keen on having correct permissions as I  
want to have an "uber-backup" that's both incremental, mirror, and -  
bootable. For bootability, I really need to have permissions and gid  
information transferred correctly. Any help appreciated - if you need me  
to inject debugging statements into the rdiff-backup's python source, just  
say what and where.

Thanks in advance,
  Attila.

--
home: http://www.szegedi.org