Kopia Server ACL allows snapshot listing but not directory listing

Support
1

I have managed to set up a Kopia Server and a Kopia client.

By default, a user can only see his own snapshots. On the server, I have given a particular user the right to see all snapshots:

$ kopia server acl list
id:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx user:test1@example access:READ target:type=snapshot

On the client, with that user test1@example , I can now see all snapshots:

$ kopia snapshot list --all
...
2026-05-25 23:30:45 CEST xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 6.2 KB drwxrwxr-x files:5 dirs:4 (latest-6,daily-4)
...

However, I cannot list the files inside that snapshot:

$ kopia list xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

unable to open object: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: unexpected content error: access denied

The exact same command works on the server without any problems.

What am I doing wrong?

I am using Kopia version 0.23.0 in a Docker container, both on the client and on the server.

Thanks in advance,
rdiez

2

I found the problem.

“kopia server acl enable” is a misnomer. ACLs are always enabled, but, if there are no ACLs, then some defaults ACL apply. The moment you create an ACL, the default ones no longer apply, which is confusing.

I deleted my custom ACL, and then executed “kopia server acl enable” in order to turn the default ACLs into explicit ACLs. Then I added my ACL, and everything now works as expected.

The documentation is also incomplete. Page Repository Server | Kopia states that the ACL type can be ‘snapshot’, ‘policy’, ‘user’ or ‘acl’, and ‘content’ is missing. Fortunately, I saw the ‘content’ type in the default ACLs.