Restore from Deja dup back up Problem - HELP!

Support & Help Requests Raspberry Pi
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Hi All.

RPI 3, Ubuntu Mate 16.04.1 up to date

Now I am in trouble…

Last night (everything working beautifully) I decided to launch GNURadio Companion. Something went wrong. It appeared as though GNURadio could not see that there was an Xsession running and it very slowly launched a completely different X display manager and then launched a completely different type of X application format (maybe GNU X on top of the mate desktop. It looked hideous and functioned even worse until BANG. My system locked up tighter then concrete. After about 15 minutes, I was able to get to a terminal screen (Ctrl Alt F2). Rather then bring it down nice, I rebooted from the prompt.

That is when the trouble started. On reboot, I found that something had overwritten, corrupted, deleted my user log in preferences. And it would not let me log in. It would fail every time but give me zero errors. Just return me to the XDM log in screen. Fortuitously, I had created another user ID with admin privs. It did allow me to log in using that ID.

Once logged in, opened a terminal were I could in fact log in using my primary ID and password. So, the userids, passwords and groups were all in tact. However, it would not allow me to sudo or su to root using the primary id (no error - just wouldn’t accept the userid and password). It would with my backup ID.

Fearing the worst, I backed up my primary ids home directory completely using Deja Dup. I had no way of knowing if it backed up everything because it was contained in encrypted file containers. I did look but nothing I could see there looked like original files.

At that point I wacked the primary userid and choose the remove files option (knowing I had a backup). I re-created the userid and proceeded to “restore” with Deja Dup. Everything went perfectly. Except, my desktop preferences were not restored and the .Mozilla and .Thunderbird directories were no where to be found. Everything else was backed up and restored properly.

I have since re completed the restore to a separate directory for inspection. Sure as H.e.l.l. those files and directories were not backed up, are not present in the restore files.

I lost all of my desktop configuration, bookmarks, browser preferences, addon config, and all my mail. I have work arounds for some of those things at the expense of enormous amounts of time.

Rhetorical questions:
What is the point of a back up program that can apparently decide on its own to NOT back up all the really important crap in your home directory?
Did it work properly? Was it supposed to do that?
Did I do something wrong?
How is it possible for GNUradio to wack my user profile?

Does anybody know what may have been the issue with GNURadio? I have launched it many times and never seen anything like this before. I have not launched since September/October. Many updates and revisions installed since then. The version is up to current date and has not been updated for a long time.

Who is in charge of the Deja Dup applications? I am mad as hell… please direct me to their hate mail address.

Thanks for your help!

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Hi @jlxb,

sorry to hear you are having problems, I don't have an answer for regarding Deja Dup but offer a few of my own back-up suggestions instead (most likely not what you want but there you go!).

I copy all my important files to an external USB drive and also to other reserve partitions on my computer.

If I need to do a new install, I use the "Something else method" which keeps all my settings and data intact and only leaves for me to re-install all my fav apps which I do with a pre-written "Meta Terminal Command" (sudo apt-get install blah blah blah blah etc).

I don't rely on back-up apps for the very reasons you have stated above!.

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I’ve never had this problem, the only thing that I can think of is that if a file is owned by root you need to run the application as root in order to be able to back it up.
You can check the files that arre currently backed up somewhere with this command:
duplicity list-current-files file:///path/to/backup | less

This is the official deja dup site I believe https://launchpad.net/deja-dup but it uses duplicity to do the actual backups http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

1 Like
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Sorry to hear that happend to you, jlxb. Did you back this up to an external hard drive or a different location on the same hard drive? It sounds like the back up and restore process worked, but may have restored to a different location other than the primary id that you re-created. My experience with the program is the same as @Asta1986. If the home directory was encrypted, you should have been prompted to do SUDO before the program would run or it will just not run.

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Asta1986, that is a really good point. Though I see from the new user created that the files are not owned by root. Nor was the backup done by root or under SU. I have checked as you suggested and the missing files are not contained within the encrypted backup files.

I have now been to https://launchpad.net/deja-dup and filed my comments there.

Thanks for your help!

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Qaztacos, I backed up to an external hard drive. It went flawless as far as I could see.

The directory that I restored to was in essence the same as was backed up - having re-created the same id and home directory. Pretty straight forward, I thought., The directories backed up were not encrypted directories. The backup files were encrypted by Deja-Dup - PGP I think.

I was not prompted for su password to do the restore. I was prompted for the encryption password for Deja-Dup to decrypt and allow the restore.

Thanks for your help!