I am using restic for backups. I would like to use a non-root user to backup my docker volumes. As the files in the volumes have very different access rights and groups, accessing them is difficult without root rights.
Chowning the files doesn’t help sustainably, as new files are created with a different group again.
What recommendation do you have to smoothly backup files from the docker volumes?
Tags #restic #backup #docker
You could just have a dedicated backup user that is in all the groups of you docker volumes.
This is a common strategy in enterprise, they’re called Service Accounts.
Rather than let all services/apps run under one admin account (windows) or a single account with root (*Nix), an account is created for each service/app, with only the minimum necessary permissions. These accounts are also limited, sometimes they’re local accounts on a given server (rather than a domain/directory account), usually with no login capability (so couldn’t run in a user context).
This way you prevent a 3rd party service/app from having change access to other services/apps (in Windows services run as system by default, a terrible security hole). It also prevents a rogue admin from using such access to change other things (or if the service account credentials were stolen).
This might be a good idea. It would only work for files that allow read access for the group, but that should be fine