Installing rclone to push backup

[inomi13]

I installed rclone on root account and rclone works correct and copy backup files to another server after DA finish do backup but I know that I shouldn’t do this on root account so I need advices or instructions how should I install rclone correctly. Should I create specific user for rclone, should this user sudo privileges etc.?

 

[altayevrim]

Well in my setup I created a backup user and used that user to dump MySQL databases and rclone to drive with encryption. It used cron and added pushover support for notifications (both fail and success) and it worked like a charm. I didn’t even need to give sudo access to the user. I think cron scripts that works with 3rd party software should not run on root.

Anything can happen. My solution is not that perfect either since at least I am giving read permission to that user for all dbs on MySQL but at least if some bug occurs nothing gets deleted

 

[inomi13]

Of course I can be able to run rclone without root but this solution is better for me. I am thinking that run rclone with root account is not risky because rclone doesn’t work on public port so exploit of the account would be unlikely. What do you think?

 

[altayevrim]

I can't tell it's risky or not but personally I do think that if something doesn’t need more permissions, then it’s not worth granting them. It's an open source package after all, a father and son full time working on it, so since for 10+ years nothing seriously happened, we can eliminate the risk factor of trusting the authors but xz utils incident still manages to scare me, so I'd go with - as I did actually - less permission option. Sometimes I see myself as paranoid and couldn't decide if it is a good thing or not, that is yet to be decided.