Restic Unlock Error

[caioreix]

I’d like to point out an issue that took me days to understand and resolve. When using restic with rclone, the _unlock function is called whenever an existing repository is detected. In my case, I configured rclone using environment variables, as I find it quicker and safer to reproduce compared to using an rclone.conf file.

Here’s where the problem arises: if you don’t define an rclone.conf, running any restic command results in the following log message:

rclone: 2025/03/12 19:12:39 NOTICE: Config file "/tmp/.config/rclone/rclone.conf" not found - using defaults
Apparently, this log causes the _unlock function to think there’s still a lock present. As a result, when it tries to perform the unlock, it gets the same log output about the missing config file and assumes it wasn’t able to unlock the repository.

I spent a lot of time figuring out what was going on. The solution I found was to set the RCLONE_LOG_LEVEL=ERROR environment variable. This way, the notice doesn’t get printed, and the lock issue no longer occurs. However, I believe this kind of situation shouldn’t affect the lock validation process in restic.

[itzg]

This image simply bundles and calls rclone, etc. It looks like I'm behind on rclone and restic versions, so if I upgrade those it might help.

[itzg]

I have upgraded rclone and restic in the latest image. Can you re-pull and see if that happens to help?

[sleeping-miyagi]

I'm running into a similar issue using the latest image.

minecraft-mc-backup-1  | 2025-04-18T11:18:55+0800 INFO Repository already initialized
minecraft-mc-backup-1  | 2025-04-18T11:18:55+0800 INFO Checking for stale locks
minecraft-mc-backup-1  | 2025-04-18T11:18:55+0800 WARN Confirmed stale lock on repo, unlocking...
minecraft-mc-backup-1  | 2025-04-18T11:19:03+0800 ERROR Unable to unlock the repo. Is there another process running?
minecraft-mc-backup-1  | 2025-04-18T11:19:12+0800 INFO Initializing new restic repository...
minecraft-mc-backup-1  | rclone: 2025/04/18 11:19:17 ERROR : Failed to save config after 10 tries: failed to create temp file for new config: open /config/rclone/rclone.conf3945229225: permission denied

Running restic unlock produces this:

rclone: 2025/04/18 11:18:19 NOTICE: Config file "/tmp/.config/rclone/rclone.conf" not found - using defaults
rclone: 2025/04/18 11:18:19 CRITICAL: Failed to create file system for "gdrive:minecraft/minecraft-restic-repo": didn't find section in config file ("gdrive")
Fatal: unable to open repository at rclone:gdrive:minecraft/minecraft-restic-repo: error talking HTTP to rclone: exit status 1

What fixed it for me is creating a directory for rclone containing the rclone.conf in my docker compose like so:

    volumes:
      - ./rclone:/config/rclone # this works

Instead of

    volumes:
      - ./rclone.conf:/config/rclone/rclone.conf # this causes problems

[firstlane]

I also ran into the issue that sleeping-miyagi mentioned after restarting my backup container today. It was trying to unlock the repo (an rclone/restic backup) but it kept saying Unable to unlock the repo. Is there another process running?

Running restic unlock produced the same results from the previous comment. I ended up going into my Google Drive and deleting the lock file that was there and this allowed my backups to continue.

I'm using the latest image as I set this up yesterday.

[itzg]

I just realized there's a new restic release. I'll upgrade the image to that and we can if that will help.

https://github.com/restic/restic/releases/tag/v0.18.0

[steveiaco]

I can still reproduce this issue on the latest release of the image. I am using restic+rclone with Google Drive. Only solution I've found to fix this is deleting the entire backup directory on my drive. There is no lock file present when this error pops up.

[steveiaco]

I've discovered a fix for this: ensure the directory the rclone cache is writable (the rclone config/cache directory defaults to /tmp/.rclone.conf in my container).

[itzg]

Good find. I seem to remember that being an issue with some of the storage providers where rclone wants to write an updated token back to the config file.

I thought I had documented something about that, but apparently not 😦 .

[steveiaco]

Thanks for maintaining this project!

[firstlane]

Yes, I forgot to come back and report this, but that was the same fix I came to. The fix mentioned in my previous comment didn't work after some time, but setting :rw on the config volume has mostly fixed the issues for me.

One thing that would be helpful would be to add the actual error output from restic unlock so that instead of just seeing ERROR "Unable to unlock the repo. Is there another process running?" we could have a more verbose reason for why it failed. This was what eventually helped me discover the permissions issue if I remember correctly.