Backup fails in Plesk: Unable to pack: Cannot stat: Permission denied

Symptoms

• Plesk Obsidian running on a Linux-based operating system
• A Plesk Backup fails with a lot of warnings that are similar to the following:

  Warning: Subscription "example.com"
  Unable to back up files from /var/www/vhosts/example.com owned by Apache. Error: Failed to create archive: backup_apache-files_2108171522.tgz 20
  Repository error: Unable to pack /var/www/vhosts/example.com: /usr/lib64/plesk-9.0/sw-tar: /var/lib/psa/dumps/pmm-ru-ca-includes-gTvqR3: Cannot stat: Permission denied
  /usr/lib64/plesk-9.0/sw-tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

• A search for the variables DUMP_D and DUMP_TMP_D reveals that they are both configured to lead to the same directory:

  # grep "DUMP_D|DUMP_TMP_D" /etc/psa/psa.conf
  DUMP_D /var/lib/psa/dumps
  # Backups temporary directory. DUMP_TMP_D should not be inside of (or equal to) DUMP_D.
  DUMP_TMP_D /var/lib/psa/dumps

Cause

The paths of DUMP_D and DUMP_TMP_D should never lead to the same directory, because DUMP_Dis for storage of permanent files, while DUMP_TMP_D is intended for storage of temporary files that are deleted automatically after a certain period of time.

Resolution

1. Connect to the server via SSH

2. Open the file /etc/psa/psa.conf by using your favorite command-line text editor

3. Change the value of the parameter DUMP_TMP_D to make it use a directory that is not the same DUMP_D uses

   For example:

   DUMP_TMP_D /root/tmp

Additional information

Backup File Structure | Plesk Obsidian documentation