Issue Backup warning : /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/sw-tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

[Aurelienbis]

Hello,

I have this message everyday when performing automatic backup with Plesk :

Not all the data from /var/www/vhosts/XXX was backed up successfully:
/usr/lib/plesk-9.0/sw-tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

I use Plesk Obsidian 18.0.37 with Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS

I found this workaround : Avoid tar: Removing leading `/' from member names message in backup scripts

Problem is I do not use cron for backup, but Plesk, and Plesk mighthave his own way for managing backups. I don't know how to apply this workaround, and I think it would be a better idea to let Plesk manage it.


So I think the problem is specific to my subscription "XXX". I don't have this warning with other subscriptions.
Any idea where to begin ? Is it a file/folder with a wrong name ? A wrong parameter ?

 

[IgorG]

Usually, it is caused by the incorrect structure of subfolders in /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/wp-content/.
This warning can be safely ignored. It means that backup was successfully created, but some files were not accessible during its creation.
As possible solution remove suspicious folder hop CC (Windows)< from /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/wp-content/:

# rm -rf /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/wp-content/hop CC (Windows)<

If it is not clear how this folder appeared, scan example.com against some malware using the instructions from this article: How to scan a website hosted in Plesk against malware.

 

[Aurelienbis]

Usually, it is caused by the incorrect structure of subfolders in /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/wp-content/.
This warning can be safely ignored. It means that backup was successfully created, but some files were not accessible during its creation.
As possible solution remove suspicious folder hop CC (Windows)< from /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/wp-content/:

# rm -rf /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/wp-content/hop CC (Windows)<

If it is not clear how this folder appeared, scan example.com against some malware using the instructions from this article: How to scan a website hosted in Plesk against malware.

I did not find any folder with that name, nor any virus after a scan.

 

[Bitpalast]

We have the same returning issue in some customer accounts. It's just like IgorG said, but it might not be that very same folder name. The issue is about bad names in folders in general and can occur in wide variety of settings. Users need to learn to name their files properly. If they don't, backup cannot work and many other things won't work on these files either. There is no simple medicine for this.

 

[Aurelienbis]

We have the same returning issue in some customer accounts. It's just like IgorG said, but it might not be that very same folder name. The issue is about bad names in folders in general and can occur in wide variety of settings. Users need to learn to name their files properly. If they don't, backup cannot work and many other things won't work on these files either. There is medication for this.

Any idea where to begin with ?

Should I look for spaces or other special character ?

 

[Bitpalast]

You could look for file names with special characters, file or directory names with hyphens or a specific order of hyphen and punctuation like "-." or "- " or "--". Filenames that start with a hyphen could be problematic, and surely filename with brackets. Anything that has spaces in it can cause problems, anything with non-ASCII characters.

 

[Aurelienbis]

I used
detox -r -v *
Tried to replace every combination of hyphen/space/dot with bash script
but it didn't change anything.
At this point I think I'll just ignore the warning.