I recently gave the restic backup tool a try and was impressed. To date I’ve just relied on Apple’s
Time Machine, but it seems to almost always be backing or cleaning for no clear reason. I found that restic’s
scans of the things I wanted to back up completed within a minute. Sold on using it in earnest, I decided to automate it by adding a cron job. This was met with… no backups. The troubleshooting ensued:
Y
- Is the crontab set up correctly? Should be fine with
* * * * *for testing. ❌ - Maybe it’s erroring? Stack Overflow taught me that the output from
cronwill by go nowhere by default (on MacOS), so I added>/tmp/stdout.log 2>/tmp/stderr.logand took a peek. YES there was an error about the directory I was running in. I updated my command:cd /Users/kalafut && ./restic_backup.sh >/tmp/stdout.log 2>/tmp/stderr.log. It helped, but then I got a new error. ❌ ReadDir: open /Volumes/TIME MACHINE/restic/keys: operation not permitted. I changed the owner of theresticfolder. Nothing. Verified that the user running the process was me. Looks good. Hmmm. ❌- Lots of searching led me to the Full Disk Access permissions on MacOS, which seemed promising. I gave permission to
resticbut that didn’t help either. This made sense, given that I could run it fine from the CLI manually. ❌ - The Aha moment: I need to give
cronFull Disk Access. It worked!!! 🎉