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

[Andrew Wood]

Hi Nate/ everyone

Thanks for the suggestion below re. using a temporary directory, however the temporary directory only contains the restored /home directory and not the contents of the USB. Both locations were included as places for making back-ups to Deja-Vu, and indeed duplicity indicates that a full back-up was made of the USB - on 26 March as in my initial email to the list below.

If I use the --force option as suggested then will it actually make any difference except restoring my /home directory again? More to the point, I don't need to restore the /home directory - it was already restored and indeed into the hard disk.

It's the USB which is to be restored. I don't see how I can specify only restoring the USB and all its contents. Any suggestions? Surely, I need to specify the USB in the parameters to duplicity?

Thanks for your continued suggestions and advice,

Andrew

-------- Forwarded Message --------

Subject:	Re: [Duplicity-talk] Restoring from/to a USB stick
Date:	Mon, 11 May 2020 12:26:49 -0400 (EDT)
From:	Nate Eldredge <address@hidden>
To:	Andrew Wood via Duplicity-talk <address@hidden>
CC:	Andrew Wood <address@hidden>

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