I am now running UMate 23.04. No problems at all but I certainly did something to my home computer and I can no longer make any backup. I regularly did that to my WD and now, on launching Déjà Dup all I get is a message "Storage location not available / Waiting for WD PL to become connected".
Please help. A most important issue.
Hi, @lostados 
Let me start by saying that I don't use "Déjà Dup Backups" (the native Ubuntu MATE application that is available with the name "Backups" in the Ubuntu MATE "Accessories" menu). So, I was hoping that someone that does use that backup tool would reply to you. Since no one else has replied yet, I'll try to give some help.
Wen you say "WD", I'm guessing you're referring to a "Western Digital" hard drive, right? And what does "PL" stand for in "WD PL"? Is that an external USB hard drive that you're connecting to your home computer so you can back up the content of your internal hard drive to that external USB hard drive? What's the type of the filesystem that external hard drive use (ext4? FAT32? NTFS? other?). Can you see if the external USB hard drive is getting properly mounted by running the following 2 commands in a "Terminal" window, and see if they return any output:
lsblk | grep -i '/media'
mount | grep -i '/media'
You are right, WD stands for Western Digital. PL are my initials. It was used only for backups of my PC's hard drive. In May it ceased to be normally recognized by the pc. There follows a screenshot I took in early may after trying to use the WD external drive:
Not sure it can be opened. Essentially it says "storage location not available/waiting for 'WD PL' to become connected..."
Today I got a different result. The same external drive is identified as "xxx". On opening, it shows pdf files dating 2020 and a big warning: "The folder contents could not be displayed / Sorry, could not display all the contents of "xxx". Error when getting information for file "/media/cm/xxx/.Trash-1000. Input/output error". I must say that when I started having problems with my WD, I formatted it two or three times.
Using the terminal two commands you suggested gave the following results:
cm@cm-Inspiron-2350:~$ lsblk | grep -i '/media'
└─sdc1 8:33 0 931,5G 0 part /media/cm/xxx
cm@cm-Inspiron-2350:~$ mount | grep -i '/media'
/dev/sdc1 on /media/cm/xxx type vfat (ro,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,showexec,utf8,flush,errors=remount-ro,uhelper=udisks2)
cm@cm-Inspiron-2350:~$
I'm afraid I don't know how to interpret this.
Hello couple of questions.
Does same external drive mean you might have others that work properly and could be tried in its place to rule out drive failure?
It seems like you are discussing a message when launching deja dup, does the drive mount and work properly if you just plug it in without deja dup, do you get an unable to mount message? I've had that when I unplugged without unmounting it not aware the drive was still writing, a very slow write process at times on my machine.
Do you have access to another computer to verify drive working or not?
Am also curious if you formatted drive and there is data there.
When you formatted drive did you check it for errors?
Other snapshots I took today:
All these - but for the last - are about the WD external drive I used for backup. The last one - zzz - is a different WD drive I used for copying personal data.
Another thought. Do you have more than one usb port, are you using a usb hub. I had printer quit and it turned out to be a bad hub after trying the driver route. Also the hub should be powered as may not be enough power for device. Experienced that also.
If you are using a usb mouse you could temporarily unplug the receiver and plug in drive to that port.
Just possible guesses.
Edit added picture of my 2tb drive stats in disks used for personal backup
Edit
Another thought. On my system have a usb hub under desk with cable hanging that I use to connect to my usb drives. Thus if only using 1 cable if bad would affect drives plugged into it. Just an idea.
