Help with group permissions?
 

Hi,

I'm trying to set up a user 'backup' that has read access to the /home directory (and all subdirectories) however I'm finding the group permissions a bit confusing.

What is the best approach for this problem, do I need change the group ownership of /home(and all subdirectories) to 'backup' or is there a better way of doing this?

Paddy

first give a read permission to all sub folders under /home for group.(i.e chmod 740 user1) then assign 'backup' user as group member of that folder.
(or) assign read permission to other users of that folders (i.e chmod 704 'user1') so that all will have read access to taht folder.

backup via root user. easier. and safer(my opinion).

Yes that is easier but I'm using rdiff-backup which opens an SSH connection to the server, I feel unsure about doing this in an automated process with the root user.

still the same, if you want to backup entire home directory with a group, I feel quite troublesome, and it will bring your more trouble. Example like you need to force user write as group backup, all files/folder need to save as 660, need to overwrite existing permission and etc. Since you use the ssh, I think using root user is better than others.
However, for myself I'll mount it as local folder, so future it won't keeping send the username/password across the network(And I prefer rsync -ruv --delete).
Somebody have better ideals?

I found a good tutorial on it here

http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_rdiff_backup

I have it setup and seems to work well.

Paddy