Moving /home folder: Failed to change uid or gid: lchown [pathtofile]: operation not permitted

Edit: I solved the problem by putting the old drive in a case and manually copying the files. Still I ask myself how much sense it makes to me to backup my home folder with duplicacy if I then can’t restore it.


I am trying to set up a new linux machine and want to restore the old home folder to the new one. Now when I try to restore I encounter several errors:

When commanding duplicacy restore -r 1 threads 30 -overwrite -ignore-owner I get Failed to change uid or gid: lchown /home/user/Ardour-6.0.0/build/libs/ardour/libardour.so.3: operation not permitted, and the same when commanding the same but without -ignore-owner.

With sudo duplicacy restore -r 1 threads 30 -overwrite -ignore-owner I get told that the command duplicacy was not found.

All other threads I found recommend using -ignore-owner but this doesn’t seem to help in my case.

Any ideas what I could do are highly welcome and I’ll gladly give any additional info needed.

Hi, you start duplicacy restore as root user ?

No. only with sudo, which gave me the error “command duplicacy not found”.

Either disable environment reset in sudoers file, add duplicacy location to path to the super user, or call it by the full path.