Photo folder on macOS not included in backup

[skrap]

Describe the bug
Vorta is supposed to handle backing up my stuff. I just lost a drive, and discovered that Vorta didn't back up my photos.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Install Vorta on mac OS
2. Do a backup to borgbase
3. Have a helpful child pour a cupful of water into your laptop, destroying your drive
4. Restore from backup
5. Notice that you've lost all your photos

Environment (please complete the following information):

• OS: mac OS, something recent (old machine is dead, can't check)
• Vorta version: (same problem, but I have the "update" checkbox checked and it never asked to be updated, so probably the latest)
• Installed from: github binary distribution

Additional context
Looking at the vorta logs, it seems that there were warnings about scandir not working on the photos directory. These warnings were never presented to the user.

[m3nu]

Sorry to hear about your missing files.

MacOS does require full disk access to back up certain files that Apple deems "restricted". We added a warning about this in a recent version. Maybe you can check if this photo folder is included when Full Disk Permissions are granted to Vorta. If not, let me know which folder this is exactly (iPhoto?) and I'll test it as well.

[skrap]

The photos library indeed seems to be included once vorta was granted full disk permissions. The version of vorta I was running was 0.7.1, I think. An update to 0.7.7 caused the warning to show. Why didn't vorta ask me to update?

(This is now testing on another system, as the first system was unrecoverable.)

[bastiencyr]

Hello @skrap , sorry for your loss of photos :(
If you use pip, there is no notification. If you use brew, I don't know... Which one do you use ?

[m3nu]

Yes, that's correct. The Pip version does't check for updates.

The macOS binary on the other hand has Sparkle built-in, which will check Github for updates and can update in the background. But this doesn't always work if e.g. an update is skipped or Vorta firewalled.

[skrap]

OK, so for me the takeaways are:

1. The WARNING message from borg about scandir failing should be displayed to the user through the GUI. I would argue that warning-level is not severe enough to describe the failure to back up, but that's more of a borg issue. The Vorta issue is that it should be shown to the user through the GUI, not left in a log file.
2. The sparkle-based update mechanism has bugs and sometimes doesn't work. (I don't have any sort of firewall in place, and I did not skip updates.)
3. If there are situations where the update mechanism will not function (i.e. installed via pip) then do not show the auto-update checkbox in the GUI, and warn if the preference is set. Note that I installed via github binary, so this was not the issue in my case.

Either of (1) or (2) above would have saved me.

[m3nu]

1. is already resolved and a general problem cause by macOS security changes.

2. is a valid issue and we should hide this setting if Sparkle isn't packaged or doesn't apply (all Linux)

For 3), we used to have online bug reporting and could also do online version checks, but many users prefer their tools to be updated via a native package manager, rather than "calling home". So it's a hairy issue and only Sparkle is shipped with the macOS binary build for now.

[skrap]

Sorry, I don't think I communicated clearly enough about (1). I understand that the specific security permissions issue in this case was addressed in another issue. My request is different. In this case, aWARNING-level log from borg indicated a failure to back up. Therefore, a user needs to know about this issue. I request that WARNING-level logs from vorta be displayed to the user through the vorta GUI.

[m3nu]

How would this be implemented?

[m3nu]

Just recalled: We already added such a change some months ago. When Borg's exit code indicates warning, this will be shown in the UI. Something like "Backup finished with warnings. View logs for more"

Not sure which version this was added, but it covers this suggestion to some degree.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.