Absolutely embarrased cannot describe how I feel.
My only excuse is not having had my café au lait when I posted.    8^*

Of course it should not be there.
And the original is exactly where it should be:

groucho@devuan:~$ locate sudoers
/etc/sudoers
--- snip ---

I think it was a left-over from when I was setting up the sudoers file, playing with visudo.
Somehow got created in /home/groucho, it is empty.

Thanks a lot for your input.

A.

in any case, it's probably perms : 440 / root:root, so rsync error is normal behavior..

I make scheduled back-ups via a cron job running BackInTime.
Works well enough and has saved me from a couple of disasters.

But ever since I generated a sudoers file, I started to get an error message:

Error: rsync: send_files failed to open "/home/groucho/sudoers": Permission denied (13)

I understand that access to /home/groucho/sudoers needs root access.
But I never wanted BackInTime to run as root so I left things as they were but there has to be a solution to this.

My user is part of the all the relevant groups ie: adm lp mail dialout fax cdrom floppy tape sudo backup staff lpadmin and has read and write access to the drive/folders where the back-up is stored by BackInTime.

Maybe a sudoers entry?

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

A.