This is a heads up of a bug which has been introduced in IPFire 2.27 - Core Update 164 causing incomplete backups. Unfortunately, it wasn't spotted during the testing phase. This is not a security announcement, but still a bug which might cause inconvenience for some users. An update with the fix will be released in due course.
What went wrong?
This bug is being caused by an error in a routine which expands any globbing characters in the backup include list. Globbing is a way to use wildcards in file names like: /var/ipfire/*/settings where the asterisk character stands for any directory that the shell can find. And precisely that does not work which causes that certain files are not included in the backup.
This is not security-relevant, but if you restore those backups, you will end up with an incomplete configuration which might cause other problems and lots of things being reset to the factory default.
Most IPFire users won't be impacted by this at all, since it is normally not required to backup and reinstall your system. However, because this bug has the potential to break an installation, we wanted to highlight this problem with this post.
Workaround
In the meantime, you can manually create a backup from the console which is complete and you will be able to download this as usual to your system from the web interface:
cd / && backupctrl include
Creating the backup will take a moment and the file will appear on the web user interface and can be downloaded and restored as usual.
We apologise for this inconvenience. We do our due diligence, but every once in a while, something slips through. If you want to help us out so that these things don't happen again, please join our testing efforts, install the testing releases and report any problems so that they will be found early and won't make their way into the final release.