From 7bc2138dcb3c22ae043ca3b4d117f583b447b4e2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Thomas Waldmann Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2018 20:01:38 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] quickstart: add note about permissions, borg@localhost, fixes #3452 --- docs/quickstart.rst | 27 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 27 insertions(+) diff --git a/docs/quickstart.rst b/docs/quickstart.rst index 0fbf36955..051e1b468 100644 --- a/docs/quickstart.rst +++ b/docs/quickstart.rst @@ -55,6 +55,33 @@ Also helpful: - Other tasks fill the disk simultaneously - Hard quotas (which may not be reflected in statvfs(2)) +Important note about permissions +-------------------------------- + +Using root likely will be required if you want to backup files of other users +or the operating system. If you only back up your own files, you neither need +nor want to use root. + +Avoid to create a mixup of users and permissions in your repository (or cache). + +This can easily happen if you run borg using different user accounts (e.g. your +non-privileged user and root) while accessing the same repo. + +Of course, a non-root user will have no permission to work with the files +created by root (or another user) and borg operations will just fail with +`Permission denied`. + +The easy way to avoid this is to always access the repo as the same user: + +For a local repository just always invoke borg as same user. + +For a remote repository: always use e.g. borg@remote_host. You can use this +from different local users, the remote user accessing the repo will always be +borg. + +If you need to access a local repository from different users, you can use the +same method by using ssh to borg@localhost. + Automating backups ------------------