Is it normal to find readonly data files in my restic repo?

Getting Help
1

Hi all,

First time posting on this forum after often browsing it to find interesting info. I hope someone could help me check that my restic repo data files are healthy.

I’ve recently setup up my own repo using Restic v0.18.0; it took a while to back up all my files but it’s been working fine since then.

Recently, the NAS was accidentally turned off. (Mysterious case of cat intervention…:cat_with_wry_smile:). It happened while a restic check job was running, so I’m not too worried that the repo was affected. Still, I decided to have a look at the data files and noticed that most of them have 777+ permissions except a handful of them:

$ ll restic_repo/data/00/

[...]
-rwxrwxrwx+ 1 my_user users 129M May 24 23:00 00e4d0c741f4a...*
-r--------  1 my_user users 129M May 25 06:39 00e59fea416a7...
 ^
 Is it normal??
-rwxrwxrwx+ 1 my_user users 129M Jun  8 13:14 00e7cc9933c65...*
-rwxrwxrwx+ 1 my_user users 129M Jun  9 03:08 00e97244e7dc8...*
-rwxrwxrwx+ 1 my_user users 130M May 25 01:17 00eb294921eec...*
[...]

Is it normal? If not, should I give them similar 777 permissions as with the other files?
What if restic tries to repack/forget these data files in the future?

For info: it took me many attempts to back up the initial data because restic backup jobs would freeze due to my NAS running out of memory and relying heavily on swap, so I eventually switched to another computer to:

a) read the source data from the NAS with rclone, and

b) send it back to the NAS’ restic repo via rclone again.

More info:

  • Restic version on the NAS and the data source:
    restic 0.18.0 compiled with go1.24.1 on linux/amd64
  • I’m running restic check jobs daily but it’ll take several months to cover the whole data set.
2

Hi @Kayhadrin,

all the files in my local repositories are read-only. It is the norm that these files are read-only. The contents of all these files are not changeable. If you make changes to your repository, there always will be new files, no modification to old files. Old files will silently be deleted.

3

Restic will complain if it can’t read some files.

A file permission of 777 is always wrong as it bypasses any access restrictions. Restic by default uses 0700 for folders and 0400 for files. This ensures that only the user owning the files can read and modify them. The 777 permissions can either be a result of how you copied the files, a limitation of the protocol used to copy data to the NAS or the NAS performs some magic permission handling (The + at the end of -rwxrwxrwx+ suggests that some ACLs are in use).

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