Re: [Duplicity-talk] Restoring from/to a USB stick

[Nate Eldredge]

On Mon, 11 May 2020, Andrew Wood via Duplicity-talk wrote:

> Hello
>
> Recently, I installed the version of Fedora 32 onto my PC. I'd been using 
> Fedora 31 and Deja Vu backed up my files on a weekly basis. This included my 
> home directory and also a USB stick which was mostly but not always plugged 
> into the machine.
>
> After installing Fedora 32 then I tried to restore the PC and the USB stick. 
> While the PC restored fine - thank-you so much for that - the USB wasn't 
> restored. I should say that all the data on the USB stick had been deleted 
> prior to the attempt to restore it ie it was completely blank.
>
> I thought that perhaps the USB stick didn't restore as when the incremental 
> back-ups were made by duplicity then if there's no USB stick this is regarded 
> as all the files have been deleted. It's a guess!

That's typically true, and then when the stick is present again, it will 
be as if the files were newly created, and a brand new copy will be 
included in the backup (not just the changes since the last time they 
were present).  So this is not a very efficient way of using duplicity.

> I understand that there was a full back-up of the USB on 26 March 2020 so I 
> tried to restore the USB (/run/media/awood/7160-75C1) with this:
>
> > duplicity restore --time "03-26-2020" 
> file:///run/media/awood/MyPassport/Deja-Vu-Back-up /run/media/awood/7160-75C1
>
> But I get this response:
>
> > Restore destination directory /run/media/awood/7160-75C1 already exists.
> > Will not overwrite.

The simplest approach would be to restore to some other directory which 
doesn't already exist, and then copy the files to the USB stick or 
wherever you want them.

duplicity restore --time "03-26-2020" 
file:///run/media/awood/MyPassport/Deja-Vu-Back-up /var/tmp/new-dir

If you really need to restore the files in place, you might be able to use 
--force, but I haven't tried it.  Use caution.

--
Nate Eldredge
address@hidden