You know how “it’s always DNS?” In Linux, I think it should be “it’s always permissions”.

I tried to back up my new Kubuntu setup with the built-in backup program, which seems to be up to the task. It’s nice, clean and minimal (the actual name, by the way, is Kup, but they don’t tell you that; when you look for “KDE backup” or something similar, you get confused with Kbackup, which is a different program).

When I finished setting it up, using my external drive as a backup target, It just sat there telling me the backup program never ran. “OK, yes,” I told it, “I get that, so, start? where’s the button… how do I start you?” I burned some good coffee trying to figure this out.

Kup is configured to prompt the user automatically when everything is ready for the backup task. If something is wrong, well, it will not say anything; it will just wait for you to get things ready.

After a lot of back and forth, I realized that even though I asked my external hard drive to be accessible to all users, in practice, it wasn’t. Only root had access. The solution was to create a folder on the external and change its owner to my user (with good old chown). As soon as I did that, Kup (AKA “Backups) happily nagged me, “Hey, you want to back up your stuff?” And now it’s finally doing the thing. So yeah. Permissions.