Unable to cleanup old cache (restic 0.9.3)

I saw this thread but I don’t know if my problem is the same.

I’ve been using restic for a couple of months now and never had this problem. Since I upgraded to v0.9.3 this message appears to me twice in different hosts: removing 2 old cache dirs from /home/usr/.cache/restic: permission denied (message can be different; I lost the original message). Then running restic with sudo actually clean up the cache dir without problem. When running with sudo: repository 75ed913a opened successfully, password is correct created new cache in /root/.cache/restic. It is strange because I don’t run any restic related task with the root user; just this one. With versions 0.9.2 and earlier I never had this “problem”.

I have the restic binary in the home dir in server for system backup and the permissions for the binary are root:usr. Laptop runs restic from /usr/bin. Server is Debian Stretch and Laptop Ubuntu 18.04. Permissions in restic cache dirs for both hosts are set to their respective user.

The issue here is that the default cache directory is relative to the current system user’s home directory. It looks like there are files in ~/.cache/restic for which you don’t have write permissions. The problem with running sudo restic is that now restic uses /root/.cache/restic for the cache directory. You can explicitly set the cache directory with --cache-dir.

So, I’d run chown -R $USER ~/.cache/restic and then run restic cache --cleanup, in addition to removing /root/.cache/restic.

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Before reading this comment I ran the sudo restic snapshots --cleanup-cache and the old cache was removed. Then I deleted the /root/.cache/restic because I assumed it was created by old testing processes when I was trying out restic with the root user. Without the need of chown the permissions in restic cache dir are:

total 20
drwx------ 4 admin admin 4096 Oct 27 13:27 .
drwx------ 3 admin admin 4096 Sep  8 15:10 ..
drwx------ 5 admin admin 4096 Oct 27 13:27 75ed913ab10e5778865e408367a5b58f94685fbb4afe3ff2382bc085befc1aa1
drwx------ 5 admin admin 4096 Oct 27 05:00 83e6861b97e8debad2b4714eb810551973aaeeda5227bc179d5b54211600f7e5
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin admin   44 Sep  8 15:10 CACHEDIR.TAG

The running restic is alwyas done by admin user, so I did nothing. I waited two or three days so restic would ask me to cleanup cache again and running --cleanup-cache worked fine. I don’t know what was the “problem” but it’s no problem anymore. Thanks for taking the time to answer @fd0.

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