Hi,

A question for those who use the backup service¹:

Currently we mark the backup run as successful if rsync exits with a
success value.

There are only two exceptions: exit code 2 and exit code 24. Both of
those relate to files which rsync thought existed but ended up not
existing when it came to actually transfer them. I consider those
transient issues related to backing up a filesystem that is in use,
and not a reason to consider the whole backup run as failed.

So what about files that our rsync process cannot read? At the
moment that produces an exit code of 23, and is considered a failed
run, even though everything else got transferred. This eventually
causes a "backup age" monitoring alert because the last successful
backup run was too long ago. Even though everything else is actually
being backed up.

If we consider error code 23 as okay then a backup run that failed
to transfer one or more files due to permissions is still considered
a success and the alert goes away. But you possibly never find out
about what happened because you don't get to see the logs, you would
have to check every file in your backups to be sure they're there.

If we continue to consider error code 23 as a failure of the whole
run then you will have to either allow our rsync to read the files
concerned or else put up with perpetual alerts - which you could
silence but then would never tell you about other problems.

What should we do?

Note that most of you allow our rsync to run as root so it can
generally read everything and you'll never experience this. But in
theory you could if you found some way to deny root permission to
read something.

I would ask for opinions only from those who make use of the backup
service, as root or not.

Cheers,
Andy

¹ https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Backups

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