Back In Time

How to restore encrypted backup on new machine

Asked by Gianluca Cavalli

Hi everyone,

I searched a topic about my question but i couldn't find anything.

The question is: How do i restore encrypted backups in a new machine?

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Germar
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Best Germar (germar) said : 		#1

Please use the latest BackInTime version from our PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bit-team/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install backintime-qt4

If you still have your old machine by hand it would be best to just copy ~/.config/backintime/config to a thumbdrive and plug that into your new machine. On the new machine start BackInTime. It will ask you if you want to restore a previous config. Browse to your thumbdrive. It should automatically find the config. After pressing restore you only need to fill in your encryption password and your snapshots should show up again.

If you don't have access on your old machine anymore, you need to manually mount the encrypted snapshots first:

mkdir ~/tmp
encfs /path/to/your/backup ~/tmp
# enter your encryption password

Then open BackInTime. It will ask you again if you want to restore a previous config. It should automatically browse to your temporary mounted snapshots. Just select that one, from which you want to restore your config. After pressing restore you need to fill your encryption password and your snapshots should show up. Don't forget to unmount the temporary mount again with 'fusermount -u ~/tmp'

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Gianluca Cavalli (cavalligianluca) said : 		#2

Woo that was fast. Thank you very much. IS there any reason for installing the qt version? I've Ubuntu, so i think the gtk version is better. They have same features, right?

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Gianluca Cavalli (cavalligianluca) said : 		#3

Thanks Germar, that solved my question.

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Germar (germar) said : 		#4

The Qt4 is the new GUI which replaces both Gtk and KDE GUI. It was to much work to maintain both. So I decided to ditch the Gtk GUI and ported the KDE GUI to pure Qt which will run on all DEs.

So if you use current version (1.1.6 at time of writing) you only have the Qt4 GUI. The gnome package is just a virtual packages to replace the old one. But the old versions (<1.1.0) made it quite complicated to restore a config on a new machine. That's why I recommended to use current version.

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Gianluca Cavalli (cavalligianluca) said : 		#5

Ok, thanks. I've tried the method you proposed and worked perfectly ;).

btw: there's a little error in the italian translation about "cifratura ocale" instead of "cifratura locale". I proposed the correct version in the launchpad. Bye

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Germar (germar) said : 		#6

Thanks for fixing the translation!