Restore SDDC Manager Appliance fails with "Permission denied" or "EXTRACT_SDDC_MGR_BACKUP_FAILED" when using the manual modified backup file

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager / VCF Installer
• VMware Cloud Foundation

Issue/Introduction

When attempting to restore SDDC Manager from a file-based backup that has been manually modified, the restore task fails during the "ExtractSDDCManagerBackup" stage.

The following error may be observed in the API response :

"errorCode" : "EXTRACT_SDDC_MGR_BACKUP_FAILED",
"message" : "[Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/log/vmware/vcf/sddc-support/backup-YYYY-MM-DD-hh-mm-ss-nnnn/vcf-backup-XXXX-YYYY-MM-DD-hh-mm-ss/metadata.json'"

Environment

VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2.x

Cause

This issue occurs because the backup archive was extracted and re-archived by a non-root user (e.g., 'vcf' user).
SDDC Manager backup archives contain files owned by multiple system users (e.g., vcf_sos, vcf_operationsmanager). When a non-root user performs the extraction, these original ownerships and permissions are lost, causing "Permission denied" errors during the restore process.

Resolution

To preserve the required file ownership and permissions, all manual backup modification steps—including extraction, editing, and re-archiving—must be performed as the 'root' user.
After the new archive is created, ensure the ownership of the final .tar.gz file is changed back to the vcf user to allow the SDDC Manager API service to read it:

chown vcf:vcf <backup_archive_name>.tar.gz

Additional Information

Recovery Plan for a VMware Cloud Foundation Instance
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-5-2-and-earlier/5-2/vcf-instance-recovery-5-2/vmware-cloud-foundation-instance-recovery-plan.html

Japanese version of this KB : https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/441183