Backing up to Backblaze with root priveleges?

Getting Help
1

I’ve been using Restic to B2 for a couple years now and it’s worked great, however, I’m changing my backup strategy and I’ve hit some snags.

My new backup flow includes two backups to an external HDD: 1) a restic script backing up my user data 2) a Timeshift schedule backing up files owned by BOTH root and a user named “bob”. The second stage of my backup flow is to then use Restic to backup the entire HDD to Backblaze.

The immediate issue I have is I can’t seem to run the Backblaze backup command without error because when I attempt to run the backup as root, it doesn’t see the environment variables required. I can set the environment variables at user bob’s level but apparently not as root. I’m assuming since I’m now trying to backup the Timeshift data described above that I must backup as root to have the priveleges required to both backup and restore properly but correct me if I’m wrong.

Here’s a screen capture:

root@pop-os:/media/bob/RED_BACKUP# export B2_ACCOUNT_ID=xxx
export B2_ACCOUNT_KEY=xxx
root@pop-os:/media/bob/RED_BACKUP# sudo restic -r b2:bucketname:foldername --verbose backup /media/bob/RED_BACKUP
open repository
Fatal: unable to open B2 backend: Account ID ($B2_ACCOUNT_ID) is empty
root@pop-os:/media/bob/RED_BACKUP#

Any guidance in how to achieve my goal is greatly appreciated!

2

Hmmm, many people have seen the question but no suggestions. I’m wondering if what I’m asking is even possible?

3

Just drop the sudo and it’ll work. No need to sudo when you’re root and sudo doesn’t preserve the environment by default:

[root@pc ~]# export FOO=bar
[root@pc ~]# sudo env | grep FOO
[root@pc ~]# sudo --preserve-env env | grep FOO
FOO=bar
[root@pc ~]#

Also, see the warning about Backblaze at:

https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/030_preparing_a_new_repo.html#backblaze-b2

1 Like
4

My concern is that if I back up files that are owned by root, restoring them will be a problem since the permissions may have issues on the restored files. I’ll build a small test case to see how that goes before doing the full backup, which will take days to complete. Thanks.

5

If you run sudo as root user, then you’re still root afterwards. restore will be able to properly set the file permissions, if it is run by the root user.