Newbie: Recover files manually

On 10.05.2020 10:05, Michael Jenner wrote:
> New question #690588 on Duplicity:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/duplicity/+question/690588
>
> Hello!
>
> I've grown tired of maintaining long bash scripts for handling backups and I'm looking for something more elegant.
> A lot of people point to duplicity / duply.
>
> Being a little cautious with complex file formats etc, the following question pops up for me:
>
> Say, for unknown reasons, duplicity and duply suddently stop working (I know this is theoretical) - would it be possible to manually recover files from a backup?

well of course this happened in the past to users. especially because duplicity used to break after the first error and there was no way to have it continue with restoring the next file. this should be fixed since some time (use parameter --ignore-errors).

restoring _full backup_ files is not easy but pretty forward if you really need to. see e.g.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/DejaDup/Help/Restore/WorstCase
or
https://askubuntu.com/questions/793135/how-to-restore-a-broken-deja-dup-backup-manually

in principle you can do the same for _incrementals_ using rdiff to patch previous states as duplicity does internally.

having written all that. while possible it will probably easier most of the times to seek the issue in duplicity and fix it before going to length and restore manually, especially if the number files increases or sizes decrease.

have fun.. ede/duply.net