[rdiff-backup-users] Restoring permissions on a rdiff-backup snapshot

[Jordi Mallach]

Hello,

I have a series of backups for different hosts that now hold several
months of incremental changes. When these backups were created,
rdiff-backup was being called as user "backup", which had no special
privileges, so the daily snapshot for these hosts were owned by
"backup", and didn't retain some permission bits and ownerships.

Recently I reworked things a bit and the scripts are now run by root. I
expect this would restore permissions on the snapshot, but it didn't.
Apparently it is slowly doing it for changed files only, but I expect
most of them won't ever change. (OTOH, this only affects the unpacked
daily snapshot; the data is correct in the rdiff-backup-data archives.)

Is there any way I can tell rdiff-backup to update the permissions on
all files on the next run? If not, does anyone have an idea of how I
could do this? I've thought of using rsync with a few obvious excludes
to syncronise the permissions, but that would also bring the few changes
that happened between the end of rdiff-backup and my rsync run to the
daily snapshot. This isn't a really big issue unless the next
rdiff-backup run would be affected by this. Would it?

Thanks,
Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach <address@hidden>
Àrea de Sistemes d'Informació :: Institut Tecnològic d'Informàtica