Repair disk permissions on Catalina best practice?

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Anyone know the best practice for repairing disk permissions on an external drive on Catalina?

FirstAid doesn’t help, and the Repair disk permissions option has been removed. Some articles say the command-line command doesn’t work either, and I don’t want to risk the file system to trail and error. (I have backups, of course.)

Right now, Arq is failing because it can’t read a couple of dot files on the drive.

Backup session for /Volumes/fMRI started on October 22, 2020 at 6:01:15 AM EDT
Found completed backup record for /Volumes/fMRI
Error: /Volumes/fMRI/.DocumentRevisions-V100: The file “.DocumentRevisions-V100” couldn’t be opened because you don’t have permission to view it.
Error: /Volumes/fMRI/.TemporaryItems: The file “.TemporaryItems” couldn’t be opened because you don’t have permission to view it.
Saved backup record for /Volumes/fMRI
Scanned 558.153 GB (121868 files)
Uploaded 0 bytes
Backup session for /Volumes/fMRI ended on October 22, 2020 at 6:02:24 AM EDT
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The first of those files is a Spotlight index file and the second temporary.

Is the whole backup for that drive failing, or just those files?

Backing up the Spotlight index might not be useful since if you did a restore you’d probably want Spotlight to rebuild its index anyway.

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Yeah, that’s true.
The other dot files were excluded, but those two were enabled for some reason. They are also excluded on my other external drive.

Hm. Well, I just unchecked them. Still somewhat of a mystery, since the backup has been working since August. I might have used some software that recreated or changed them somehow.

Thanks!

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I’ve had that problem with Arq. In my case, Yoink’s files in /Containers always cause a backup error. I’ve unchecked them in settings a dozen times, and yet the Arq error notice persists.

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