So, I did a complete backup of my Ubuntu MATE system and installed vanilla Ubuntu so I could see if all the GNOME improvements were real... and now I can't restore from my backup. I get "Restore Failed. Giving up after 5 attempts. Error: Error splicing file: Input/output error."
I had an encrypted backup on a physical drive, not on Google or any cloud provider. Does the switch from MATE to GNOME have anything to do with it, maybe?
Personally, I doubt the switch from Mate to Gnome is related.
There was a discussion about the "splicing" error here a few days ago, in this thread:
I have had that error particularly with large files. I've never pinned down if it is a buffering problem, or just that a huge file is more likely to evidence a random error.
My guess is your backup had file errors in it. Was it a plain backup? Or in a format with checksum/restore capabilities like .tar or even .zip?
It was in .gpg format. It looks like duplicity-full.<date and time>.manifest.gpg
The backup is about 120 GB in size, but I've done restores that size before. It seems to stop when importing my Virtual Studio Code preferences from ~/.config, which I didn't even know it was backing up. Since there are about 2300 files in the backup, maybe I could somehow figure out which one is the offender and delete it?
Hello Leoj03
I went the other way once in 2014, I never did go back though. 
If I were in your position I would consider having a second backup made with Grsync. Look at the video on this post:
Restoring from a Grsync backup might work for you.
The problem is, I already reinstalled, so my Deja Dup backup is my only backup.
Since Deja Dup is powered by duplicity, you can try restoring manually via the Terminal:
duplicity restore file:///path/to/backups/ /path/to/extract-to/
Or like this:
duplicity restore --file-to-restore / file:///path/to/backups/ /path/to/extract-to/
The other way to extract the files is to look into the difftar files, which are just regular tarballs - but encrypted with GPG:
duplicity-full.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.vol1.difftar.gpg
So this might be another way is to decrypt and extract the contents:
gpg duplicity-full.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.vol1.difftar.gpg
tar -xvf *.difftar
If there's many of them, they will span across multiple files as this backup method stores files that changed since the last one. It's possible the I/O error could occur again (in which would suggest a hard drive issue)
Deja Dup likely won't accept them if you were to modify the tarballs and re-encrypt them (gpg -c), since that would invalidate the signatures.
I manually use a shell script that uses rsync to backup. grsync which @alpinejohn suggests is actually a frontend for rsync.
I think the Input/output error is an external drive error, since I copied the backup files to my internal hard drive and didn't get it, but now it gets stuck while backup up ~/.config/Code, which I think is my Virtual Studio Code config. It stayed stuck on that for about two hours. Sometimes it just says "Failed for an unknown reason," but that goes away if I reboot.
Hello Leoj03
This is a work-around.
Duplicity makes compressed backups - so you need duplicity to read them back onto a system.
You might consider the following if all else fails:
- Install Mx Linux on a computer (Debian-based and installs almost everywhere).
- Install Synaptic package manager.
- Via Synaptic install duplicity.
- Point duplicity to the backup location and try to restore.
- If the restore works, make a Grsync uncompressed backup.
- Use the Grsync uncompressed backup to try to restore to your original computer.
Sound crazy? Perhaps. But if all else fails it might work.
@alpinejohn Before I go and install Linux on some computer I don't have available for Linux...
When I try to do it from the command line with gpg --multifile --decrypt duplicity-full.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.*.difftar.gpg I get an error saying Fatal: zlib inflate problem: invalid stored block lengths. I've tried looking this up, but I can't find anything to help. I think that if I can find the bad file, maybe I can remove it, but that command doesn't tell me what file it's on. Also, as I said before, Deja Dup gets stuck on some file in ~/.config/Code but doesn't say anything. However, I noticed a small exclamation point on the icon that went away when I closed the window.
Hello Leoj03
My last idea - have you tried reaching out to the duplicity maintainer/team [https://launchpad.net/~duplicity-team] ? If you are fighting to recover your only copy of your data the measure is surely justified. They wrote/maintain the code. If anyone can help, I would imagine its them.
Good luck.
@alpinejohn Thanks, but I think I have a solution. If I go to a specific folder, right-click, and choose 'Restore missing files,' I can get back the files I want. It seemed to be messing up on some VSCode config file that I didn't even really want, so I think that this will work fine. Thanks to everyone who offered instruction and advice!