It's not possible to realize the settings of permissions in another way generally.

StoreBackup does the following (simplified a lot):

1. going down from top level of backupDir and generating the files and directories.
Permission 0700 is used temporarily for security reasons.

2. going up from lowest level of backup and setting the final permissions of the directories.

Now imagine the case when you make a backup as 'JoeAverage' . Also imagine, you are creating from top down the directories with the correct permissions. Unfortunately you've set the permissions for one directory in a way that you yourself ('JoeAverage') have no write permissions in that directory... Then you cannot backup the files and directories inside that directory any more.
Naturally, JoeAverage cannot save files where he does not has read access to.

btw, root can read all files, even those where he has no read permissions (chown 000).

Thanks for your reply.

I found out that when a backup is completed, the directories' permissions are set right. It is only during a backup (and when a backup is stopped before it has completed) that the directories' permissions are all 0700. Is it meant to be that way?

My root user's umask already is 0022 (Ubuntu's default) so it is not the culprit here.

(Sorry for the spamming, I wish I could edit my comments).

File permissions are preserved (i.e. identical to original), only directory permissions are chmoded 0700.

Other information that might be relevant:

My OS is Kubuntu.

backupDir is in a USB disk on ext4 mounted with options "defaults,noauto,errors=remount-ro".

backupDir and series directories are chmoded 0755.

Hi Vianney,

I do not have that kind of problem in my backups.
So, do you use the actual version (3.5) or an old one?

You get the version number by call one of the scripts with the option '--version'.