Back in time displays 'saving permission...' in the bottom left corner of the GUI all the time, even when it is not being actively used. Does it always do that with other users? Is it a harmless glitch? Are the back ups usable?
(I don t want to sound overly paranoid but it is a bit of a sensitive thing, thhis back up business)
I answer @Germar's question in the comments:
it is local, full rsync is not activated and the file system on the destination drive is msdos.
I'm not sure about some facts, so I'll try to answer both:
it can happen that the status bar message is frozen. BIT will read the message from ~/.local/share/backintime/worker<ID>.message. Sometimes this file did not get removed correctly and BIT will keep showing that message even if there is no more snapshot running. Deleting the above file will fix this (next major version 1.1.0 will do this automatically).
if a snapshot crashed during saving permissions the raw data is already backed up and you can restore your files. You would only loose permission settings for the files. So in worst case you'd have to manually chown/chmod them. But if this happens every time we should dive in to find the problem. /var/log/syslog should normally show backintime (USER): INFO: Unlock at the end of a snapshot.
When you say filesystem is msdos did you mean fat or ntfs? Because fat doesn't support hardlinks. This means that every new snapshot will use the full size on your disk even if the files didn't change (they are not 'incremental'). Please take a look at this FAQ to find out if your files are incremental.
I'd really recommend using a native Linux filesystem like ext3 especially for serious stuff!
