Improve Folder Ownership and Permission Handling for Mounted Volumes

Insight & Feedback
1

Dear ZimaOS Team,

I’ve encountered a recurring issue related to folder ownership and permissions when using mounted volumes in containerized apps. Specifically, when a container (e.g., Duplicati) is configured with a mounted host path like /media/Daten/Backup, newly created subfolders within that path often default to root:root ownership with restrictive permissions (drwxr-xr-x). This prevents non-root users (e.g., UID=999) from writing to those subfolders, even though the parent directory is world-writable (drwxrwxrwx).

This behavior seems to stem from the fact that folder creation is handled by the container process, which runs as root unless PUID and PGID are explicitly set. However, ZimaOS currently doesn’t provide a way to control or override the ownership and permission model for newly created folders within mounted volumes.

Suggestion: It would be extremely helpful if ZimaOS could offer one or more of the following:

  • A way to define default PUID/PGID globally or per app
  • An option to inherit ownership and permissions from the parent directory
  • Support for setting umask or applying setgid to ensure group consistency
  • A GUI toggle to apply recursive ownership or permission fixes to mounted paths

This would greatly improve compatibility with multi-user setups, Samba shares, and backup workflows, and reduce the need for manual chown or chmod operations after container deployment.

Thank you for your excellent work on ZimaOS — I appreciate the simplicity and power it brings to home-lab environments.

Best regards,
sny

Update:
I was able to work around the issue by specifying the first subfolder directly in the Duplicati environment configuration — for example:
`/media/Daten/Backup/NewFolder : /backups/NewFolder.
With this setup, Duplicati can even access the subdirectories beneath that path.
However, when backing up data from different users, you need to manually create separate subfolders and specify each one in the environment variables.

It would still be highly desirable to have an option in the GUI to adjust folder ownership and permissions directly, which would make this process much more user-friendly.

1 Like
2

Thanks for the feedback. And the team is improving and redesigning the app management process. Of course, I will forward this to our team.