Unable to ignore the ~/.gvfs folder when backing up as root

Getting Help
#1

I have a restic job backing up my entire hard drive running as root:

restic --quiet --cleanup-cache -r $REMOTE_URL backup /

Unfortunately, root doesn’t have access to other users’ ~/.gvfs directories and so restic always displays the following error message:

error for /home/francois/.gvfs: lstat /home/francois/.gvfs: permission denied

I thought I would be able to simply exclude that directory with the following:

restic --quiet --cleanup-cache -r $REMOTE_URL backup / --exclude-file $EXCLUDE_FILE

where the exclude file includes:

/home/*/.gvfs
/home/francois/.gvfs

but it doesn’t make the error message go away.

Next I tried the following:

restic --quiet --cleanup-cache -r $REMOTE_URL backup / --exclude=/home/francois/.gvfs --exclude-file $EXCLUDE_FILE

without success.

Am I misunderstanding what the --exclude and --exclude-file arguments do or should I file a bug?

(I am able to reproduce this 100% of the time on restic 0.8.3 and 0.9.6.)

#2

Did you verify that the file is included in the snapshot? The error you are seeing probably comes from scanning the directory before doing the actual backup.

#3

I went through all of my snapshots:

ID        Date                 Host         Tags        Directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------
1c83ec45  2020-04-27 19:41:06  hostname              /
33414a78  2020-05-31 09:58:26  hostname              /
bd52dd98  2020-06-14 09:59:39  hostname              /
23ccfe15  2020-06-20 09:59:21  hostname              /
9ab8eb4a  2020-06-28 09:58:03  hostname              /
fa6c7459  2020-06-29 09:52:25  hostname              /
ce3c6777  2020-06-30 09:54:03  hostname              /
c22ab498  2020-07-01 09:55:46  hostname              /
f73ad9e4  2020-07-02 09:56:57  hostname              /
620c72c2  2020-07-03 09:58:33  hostname              /
cc448a2d  2020-07-04 10:01:30  hostname              /
1ab9155b  2020-07-05 12:06:23  hostname              /
3a38af64  2020-07-06 09:53:41  hostname              /
----------------------------------------------------------------------

and for each of them, I extracted the list of files:

restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL ls 1c83ec45 > 1c83ec45.list

and then looked for .gvfs in all of them:

$ grep "\\.gvfs" *.list
1ab9155b.list:/root/.gvfs
1ab9155b.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
1ab9155b.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
1c83ec45.list:/root/.gvfs
1c83ec45.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
1c83ec45.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
23ccfe15.list:/root/.gvfs
23ccfe15.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
23ccfe15.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
33414a78.list:/root/.gvfs
33414a78.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
33414a78.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
3a38af64.list:/root/.gvfs
3a38af64.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
3a38af64.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
620c72c2.list:/root/.gvfs
620c72c2.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
620c72c2.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
9ab8eb4a.list:/root/.gvfs
9ab8eb4a.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
9ab8eb4a.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
bd52dd98.list:/root/.gvfs
bd52dd98.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
bd52dd98.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
c22ab498.list:/root/.gvfs
c22ab498.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
c22ab498.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
cc448a2d.list:/root/.gvfs
cc448a2d.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
cc448a2d.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
ce3c6777.list:/root/.gvfs
ce3c6777.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
ce3c6777.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
f73ad9e4.list:/root/.gvfs
f73ad9e4.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
f73ad9e4.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs
fa6c7459.list:/root/.gvfs
fa6c7459.list:/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.system.gvfs.enums.xml
fa6c7459.list:/var/lib/lightdm/.gvfs

but none of them include the problematic directory.

#4

With that command line you are probably backing up a bunch of virtual filesystems that you should also skip, like /proc, /dev, and /sys. If any of your users mount random fuse filesystems, you’ll also try to back those up when you probably shouldn’t.

Instead, consider adding --one-file-system and explicitly listing the mount points of every volume you want to back up. This will solve all of these problems at once.