Ability to escalate privileges for Kopia UI

I’m on MacOS and there’s a few files under /System/Volumes/Data that KopiaUI is not able to access via the normal permissions that it runs as (files may be owned as root.)

How can I run Kopia as root or escalate privileges for certain snapshots or paths, outside of using the CLI and running with sudo or as the root user?

Kopia isn’t, as far as I am aware, designed to handle such scenarios, so I am not sure that you can temporarily escalate permissions. I would not recommend giving root access to the UI. If you still really want to backup files that are owned by root, then I would suggest using the actions ability. Instead of escalating Kopia, I would recommend using the ‘before’ action to create a temporary directory that you have read access to, copy the files into that directory (+ change permissions), then backup that directory up using Kopia. Use the ‘after’ action to cleanup the temp directory. This way, the escalation part is strictly contained in the script, which you can write yourself to do exactly what you want it to do, and nothing more.

1 Like