Backups File and Directory restoration error

Symptoms

Attempting to restore an account via FIle and Directory restoration returns an error when incremental backups are used.

Error: The system encountered an error during the attempt to restore the file. For details, check this error log, or contact your hosting provider: /usr/local/cpanel/logs/error_log .

The cPanel error log file "/usr/local/cpanel/logs/error_log" displays the following message or similar:

The system detected problems when it tried to restore the 
“/backup/2022-02-05/accounts/cpaneluser/homedir/public_html” 
backup for the “/home/cpaneluser” file. 

“/bin/gtar: Removing leading `/' from member names

/bin/gtar: Removing leading `/' from hard link targets”.

Description

When Incremental backups are in use, backups can create hard links between files in other backups which haven't changed to preserve disk space. If hard links exist for a backup being restored, an error indicating the restoration failed will trigger. Upon further inspection, the failure is a false match condition. If no additional output is received, generally, all the files are successfully restored. 

We've opened an internal case for our development team to investigate this further. For reference, the case number is HB-7363. Follow this article to receive an email notification when a solution is published in the product. 

Workaround

Please feel free to ignore the error. It is recommended to inspect the files directly to ensure the expected files are in place after the restoration.