Permission denied error when I back up to an external drive using grsync

Question

When I try to back up my home folder with grsync to an external drive I'm getting this error

rsync: opendir "/home/jackie/.cache/dconf" failed: Permission denied (13)

Can anyone help? Not related to my question but do all the applications and settings get backup as well?

Which folders have you selected to save? Some folders may not give you the user rights to backup so you can try selecting Folders to ignore to isolate them (or conversely just selecting a few to save) to see how that pans out. I recall a similar problem when setting mine up so only selected folders which were critical. — graham, Mar 03 '18 at 08:27

wjandrea · Answer 1 · 2018-04-05T19:40:27.907

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That directory is owned by root on my machine, hence the "Permission denied" error. But regardless of what's causing the issue, the whole ~/.cache directory doesn't have any data that would require backing up, so could/should be excluded from the backup. For details, see What files and directories can be excluded from a backup of the home directory?

edited Apr 05 '18 at 19:40

answered Apr 05 '18 at 18:12

wjandrea

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Hmm I don't think that directory should be owned by root though – Zanna Apr 05 '18 at 19:22
@Zanna Probably not, but I'm trying to say it's beside the point w.r.t. backups. – wjandrea Apr 05 '18 at 19:31
@Zanna Edited to clarify. – wjandrea Apr 05 '18 at 19:41

Elder Geek · Answer 2 · 2018-04-05T23:30:30.753

This is a simple permissions problem and deselecting it for backup as indicated in this answer will certainly work. Another method would be to insure that the ownership and permissions match everything else in your home directory. For example:

drwx------ 2 me me 4.0K Mar 21 15:18 dconf where me is your user name.

If that directory (~/.cache/dconf) is owned by another user you can use the chown command to set it back to your user as is typical. You could simply use the command sudo chown $USER:$USER .cache/dconf as the $USER environment variable should contain your user name. You can test that it's set properly with the command echo $USER which should return your user name.

Further if the permissions don't match, those can be set back using the chmod command In order to backup a directory, both the read and execute permissions are required. (You need execute permission to traverse a directory.) To set the permissions simply use the command chmod +rwx ~/.cache/dconf to insure that the read write and execute bits are set for the directory in question.

Note ~ is the same as your home directory and expands to /home/jackie/ in your case. You can confirm this as well using the command echo ~

Note: Backing up your home directory will not backup "all the applications and settings" Many applications/programs are launched from locations that are not in your home directory. You can find out easily by using the command which for example the command which rsync will report the rsync lives in the /usr/bin directory (along with many others). and which zcat will report that zcat lives in the /bin directory with a few good friends. Since I'm personally not too concerned about how much storage I use for backing up and like ease of restoration this is my favorite backup method.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 02 '18 at 19:46

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I had to enable the "superuser box" which allowed for a purrfect sync :)

answered Apr 02 '18 at 19:46

avi fisher

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You shouldn't need root permissions to make a backup of your home directory. See my answer for details. – wjandrea Apr 05 '18 at 18:25
@wjandrea That's true! See my answer for another method of resolving the problem. – Elder Geek Apr 05 '18 at 23:20

Permission denied error when I back up to an external drive using grsync

3 Answers3