Déjà Dup

back up fails to complete or restore on Ubuntu16.04

Asked by brumman

I need to upgrade Ubuntu 16.04 and chose to upgrade my complete home folder (21G) and also two other partitions. on this drive.
I made my first backup to external HD (2T) and it appeared to work and /media/brumman/backup ub16/duplicity-full.20210407T104947Z.manifest shows: 284 volumes and then Filelist 64833 with everything thereafter with the suffix 'new'.
For example
    new "home/brumman/Desktop/2021\x20calendar.odt"
I tried to restore this file that is corrupt since the backup. No revert functions found on any files so I tried terminal command:
       deja-dup --restore /home/brumman/Desktop/2021 calendar.odt
 result : "Failed with an unknown error". the info returned is very long but I can provide it
 The readable manifest appears to show all of the home folder and is about the right size however there was no sign of the extra partition I attempted to include. Can I actually include other partitions on my Ubuntu 16 drive?
I pray that the upgrade works and in the meantime might just copy my home and data partitions to other storage.

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#1

Not sure whether it helps in this case, but when you refer to files with special characters (e.g. space) in a command, you have to put the file name in quotes or escape the special characters.

Does
deja-dup --restore "/home/brumman/Desktop/2021 calendar.odt"
or
deja-dup --restore /home/brumman/Desktop/2021\ calendar.odt
work?

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brumman (brummancanada) said : 		#3

Thanks Manfred, unfortunately neither of the commands worked. I think I'll try to restore the full backup although I don't think it will work. I will then partition the drive so that I can just copy my data for now. I'll give Deja-Dup another try later, but again is it possible to back-up the other partitions on this drive along with my home folder or would each have to be a separate back-up?
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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#4

"neither of the commands worked"
What happens when you execute the commands? Do you get error messages?

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brumman (brummancanada) said : 		#5

yes error message is "Failed with an unknown error." I can send the traceback info if it would help but it is a 53k text list. Would I just paste the full list here or attach in some way?
I have tried a full backup restore but get the same error.

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#6

To avoid cluttering up this question document you can upload the traceback to https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/ and just add the link into this question document.

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brumman (brummancanada) said : 		#7

Thanks Manfred here is the traceback :
     https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/zhHwxkBrBC/

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Michael Terry (mterry) said : 		#8

Brumman - is there a `duplicity-full.20210407T104947Z.vol21.difftar` file in the storage location? (You should see both a duplicity-full.20210407T104947Z.vol21.difftar and a duplicity-full.20210407T104947Z.vol21.difftar.gz file - one with a .gz file ending and one without).

If you move the difftar version (the one that does NOT have a .gz suffix) out of that folder, do things work again?

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brumman (brummancanada) said : 		#9

Thaks Michael - There were 3 'duplicity-full.20210407T104947Z.vol21.difftar' and I moved them into admin trash folder. Only the file with .gz ending is left. I then tried to restore that file with command deja-dup --restore /home/brumman/Desktop/2021\ calendar.odt. This time it appeared to work, at least it reported the file was restored. However the file is still unable to open!
Perhaps I should try to restore the complete backup but if it fails can I empty the backup folder somehow or just allow a new back up to overwrite? What is the difference between the difftar and difftar.dz files?

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Michael Terry (mterry) said : 		#10

> However the file is still unable to open!

Oh really? Is there a specific error? Is the file a reasonable size?

> What is the difference between the difftar and difftar.dz files?

Duplicity makes the difftar file and then compresses it into the difftar.gz veresion.

The fact that both exist is a bug - I'm hoping that it is just because the version of duplicity shipped with 16.04 is so old, but looks like it has a bug where it did not delete the unzipped version of the file after compressing it?

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brumman (brummancanada) said : 		#11

It was only a 30k file, error message was: "the file '2021- calendar.odt' is corrupt and therefore cannot be opened. LibreOffice can try to repair the file. The corruption could be the result of document manipulation or of structural document damage due to data transmission."
However I finally found the file in Libre office recent documents and it is OK - I believe this is the restored original from the backup! I have removed the corropy version and renamed the restored one.
The storage folder has no other unzipped volumes - all are difftar.gz
The duplicity version is 0.7.06-2ubuntu2 and deja-dup 34.2-0ubuntu1.1
Hopefully the next incremental backup will be fine and when I upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04LTS deja-dup and duplicity will be bug free.
Thanks for your help.