False alarm for non-regular files?

[david.woodward]

I’m just getting started with Duplicacy, so please excuse me if there’s some easy solution to this that I’ve missed and point me in the right direction.

On my first backup I see a message stating:
2021-02-16 17:06:36.035 WARN BACKUP_SKIPPED 9 files were not included due to access errors

So, I started digging through the log file trying to figure out what the backup process didn’t have access to, but the only thing I’ve found is this:

2021-02-16 17:04:17.633 WARN LIST_SKIP Skipped non-regular file homes/David/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent
2021-02-16 17:04:17.633 WARN LIST_SKIP Skipped non-regular file homes/David/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent.browser
2021-02-16 17:04:17.633 WARN LIST_SKIP Skipped non-regular file homes/David/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent.extra
2021-02-16 17:04:17.633 WARN LIST_SKIP Skipped non-regular file homes/David/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent.ssh
2021-02-16 17:04:17.636 WARN LIST_SKIP Skipped non-regular file homes/David/.gnupg.old/S.dirmngr
2021-02-16 17:04:17.636 WARN LIST_SKIP Skipped non-regular file homes/David/.gnupg.old/S.gpg-agent
2021-02-16 17:04:17.637 WARN LIST_SKIP Skipped non-regular file homes/David/.gnupg.old/S.gpg-agent.browser
2021-02-16 17:04:17.637 WARN LIST_SKIP Skipped non-regular file homes/David/.gnupg.old/S.gpg-agent.extra
2021-02-16 17:04:17.637 WARN LIST_SKIP Skipped non-regular file homes/David/.gnupg.old/S.gpg-agent.ssh

Are these skipped “non-regular files” being logged as “access errors”, or are there actually nine other files not being backed up somewhere that I need to find and address permission issues on?

“Non-regular files” makes it sound like this is an intentional exclusion more than files being skipped because of access errors. And, if it is an error, what are we supposed to do about the error? Manually filtering all “non-regular” files as we find them by digging through logs to find what was missed/skipped/excluded sounds like a royal pain. Is there a way to turn off this error message and just accept that “non-regular” files are not included in the backup?

[saspus]

These are sockets, not files.

[david.woodward]

Thanks for the clarification, but maybe my questions got buried in the details.

Would these “sockets” be the nine “files” referenced in the error message “9 files were not included due to access errors”?

If so, is there a way to exclude these files from the calculation of skipped/error files so that I don’t think my backup is incomplete? I don’t care to know that the program skipped non-regular files if there’s nothing I can/should do about it anyway (doesn’t sound “WARN” worthy to me).

[saspus]

You can exclude them from the backup set. For example, with glob syntax:

-homes/David/.gnupg/S.*
-homes/David/.gnupg.old/S.*

Add that to your filters file. If using commas line duplicacy it’s located at .duplicacy/filters

Filters/Include exclude patterns

For the backup command, the include/exclude patterns are read from a file named filters under the .duplicacy directory. For the restore command, the include/exclude patterns are specified as the command line arguments. Duplicacy offers two different methods for providing include/exclude filters, wildcard matching and regular expression matching. You may use one method exclusively or you may combine them as you deem necessary. All paths are relative to the repository (the folder you execute d…

[david.woodward]

Thanks. I’m aware of how to use the filters to exclude the files from backup. I’ll do that and see if the warning in the stats/summary at the end of the file goes away so that I can determine if those sockets are indeed what are being reported as the 9 “files” with access errors.

But, I wasn’t really asking about excluding the files from backup. I was asking if the backup process/logging could be changed to treat such “non-regular” files as known anomalies that are logged with a debug or informational message rather than an “access error” or “warning”.

If I’m not mistaken, the current versions of rsync ignore sockets unless you specify the “–specials” argument. And older versions of rsync that did attempt to transfer sockets by default provided a “–no-specials” argument that would turn off errors regarding sockets and change the would-be errors into informational messages. Both of those seem like more efficient approaches than requiring users to create filters for every socket they encounter during their backups.

[saspus]

Ah, I see what you mean. I guess the default behavior is correct — in that it reports a warning — but having a switch to silently skip such unconventional files would indeed be helpful.

This should be a feature request.