I have been playing around with chmod, chown, setfacl and special bits trying to get multiple system/full users in same group correct access permissions to my media collection.

But I’ve messed it up somehow and now I’m having weird problems that are hard to track.

I would like to set my whole collection back to the defaults.

What is the best way to do this?

One problem I’ve had when making changes to so many files is the process seems to go forever without completing. Eventually it gets killed so my filesystem has variable attributes throughout. how can this be worked around?

I want everything to be owned by myuser, group media, everything else default I will sort it from there once I have a fresh slate.

And is there a way to backup these attributes only? I don’t have enough storage to backup the files themselves.

It is Debian with ext4 filesystem.

Edit to add: Media collection is on its own separate drive/filesystem; this has no impact on anything else on the computer.

  • Andrzej3K [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    10 hours ago

    Don’t do that. I’ve done worse, but that’s no excuse. You need to use the setgid bit (chmod g+s) of the parent folder and then look into the umask config option for whichever of your applications are creating files/directories… and what umask even is ofc lol

    • layzerjeyt@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      10 hours ago

      I did try to setgid thing but maybe it made things worse and not better.

      what umask even is ofc lol

      my conclusion also… I did kind of get to the understanding that the correct way to do this is with umask but everytime I think “I’m just going to sit down and learn about umask” I immediately am forced to admit defeat and give up. Which is why I didn’t make a post about solving the original problem, rather just to try to dig out my current hole first.