Hello everyone!
I’m new to ZimaOS and home servers in general, although I have some previous basic experiences with Linux administration. I installed ZimaOS in an old computer to build a NAS to store my personal files. As I have multiple old backups with many duplicated files that I accumulated over the years, I decided to install dupeGuru to find duplicates and try to improve my storage. However, when I try to delete files using it a permission denied error appears. I installed it using the graphical interface and the following configuration:
Docker image: jlesage/dupeguru
Category: latest
Web UI http://192.168.1.66:5800/
Network: bridge
Ports:
Host: 5800 container: 5800 protocol: tcp
Volumes:
/media/ZimaOS-HD/AppData/dupeGuru /config
/media/externaldrive/ /storage
Am I doing something wrong in the installation? Should I include something else in the configuration to allow it to delete files? Any help is appreciated.
Regards,
Lucas
Nothing wrong with dupeGuru itself. This is a Linux permissions issue.
The jlesage/dupeguru container does not run as root by default, so it can read files but cannot delete them if the mounted drive is owned by a different user (very common on ZimaOS).
Fix (recommended):
Edit the container and add these environment variables:
PUID=0
PGID=0
Then restart the container.
ZimaOS storage paths are typically owned by root, so this aligns permissions and allows dupeGuru to delete duplicates correctly.
No reinstall, no extra volumes, no privileged mode needed.
That should resolve it cleanly
Thank you for your help, but it didn’t work. I notice that it is working well in other disks but this error appears in an exfat disk that I have. I searched if there is some limitations on dupeGuru for exfat systems and didn’t find anything. I’m afraid it is something related to ZimaOs/Linux capability do deal with exfat, but I didn’t search for it yet.
Got it, thanks for the update. This helps.
I believe this is not dupeGuru and not ZimaOS, it’s an exFAT limitation.
exFAT does not support Linux file permissions (no chmod, no ownership per file). Everything is controlled at mount time. So even if the container runs as root, deletes can fail depending on how the disk is mounted.
Why it works on other disks:
- ext4 / btrfs support proper Linux permissions
- exFAT does not
What I suggest:
- Reformat the disk to ext4 if possible (best long-term fix on ZimaOS)
- Or remount exFAT with explicit ownership (uid/gid) so containers can write
In short:
dupeGuru is fine, ZimaOS is fine, but exFAT is the weak link here. On Linux NAS systems, exFAT is best treated as read-mostly or temporary storage.
I believe switching that disk to ext4 will permanently solve this.