[rdiff-backup-users] Re: Windows: backing up files the administrator can't read

[Aneurin Price]

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 15:02, Aneurin Price <address@hidden> wrote:

> I'm hoping to use rdiff-backup to perform backups on Windows retaining
> full ACLs, including for files which the administrator cannot access.

...

> On Cygwin (as of 1.7 at least) file access is wrapped to use the
> backup permission all the time, restoring some level of sanity[0].
> This allows all files to be backed up using rdiff-backup in Cygwin,
> but Windows ACLs aren't preserved, and Windows ACLs don't map directly
> onto POSIX ACLs so it looks like this won't be possible in Cygwin. The
> native build of rdiff-backup seems to be able to backup and restore
> ACLs, but it can't access quite a lot of my users' files, even when
> run as the SYSTEM user.
>
> Has anyone come across this issue before, and found a solution?

I didn't find a direct solution to this problem, however I found a
decent workaround: Windows versions since server 2003 SP2 come with a
utility called icacls[0]  which can be used to back up and restore the
ACLs of a full filesystem tree, or whatever subset you specify -
rather like metastore[1] for Windows.

Nye

[0] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919240
[1] http://david.hardeman.nu/software.php