Hi.
On Fri, Sep 04, 2020 at 01:37:07PM -0400, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:
> I'm still working on my backup system, and setting up mount points.
>
> I was hoping that if I used "user" (or "users") in the mount command (or in
> /etc/fstab) that the mounted filesystem would be owned by the user that
> mounted
> it. That doesn't (seem to) work.
Because it should not work the way you seem to expect it to. Both "user"
and "users" mount options have completely different semantics. Quoting
mount(8):
user Allow an ordinary user to mount the filesystem.
users Allow any user to mount and to unmount the filesystem, even when
some other ordinary user mounted it.
> I could do things like give write permission to everyone,
So that one user could overwrite a backup of another user.
> or set up a group with the users that I might want to be able to write to the
> backup,
See above.
> or set up a user for the specific purpose of doing backups,
grep x:34 /etc/passwd
It's there already.
> or do the backups as root,
Nothing wrong with this approach, see below.
> but none of those seem to be appropriate in one way or another.
See below.
> Is there a simple way to have the mounted filesystem be owned by the user
> that
> mounts it?
In a general case? No.
If your plan is to use a filesystem that does not provide POSIX
permissions (i.e. FAT, NTFS, ISO9660 without extensions) - then it's
possible, and you generally need "uid" and "gid" mount options.
Otherwise your best bet is recursive chown or ACLs.
> (I know something about the -o uid and -o gid options, but (1) that would
> only
> work for one specific uid, and (2), iiuc, that works only for filesystems
> that
> don't use the Unix permissions (e.g., fat32, ntfs, ...).)
It seems to me that you're trying to solve this problem a wrong way.
A question one - why would you need a *user* to perform a backup?
User tend to disregard the importance of backups, tend to forget about
doing backups, and worse - tend to destroy a perfectly valid backup just
before it's actually needed.
Would not it be better to do a backup of users' files in a centralized
way on an admin (i.e. - you) controlled schedule?
A question two - "apt search backup" shows me at least half-dozen ready
to use (and free software) backup solution. Why bother implementing your
own?
Reco
