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I recently did a clean re-install of Ubuntu 18.04. I'd been keeping regular backups using Deja-Dup to a 75GB USB HD).

When I tried to restore I got "Storage location not available¨ (and similar messages after trying different options). I ended up simply copying (via the GUI) the contents of the backup disk's home folder - which appears to be everything that was on the machine on or before August 17th 2016 (the last clean install).

The external disk's Backups folder contains plenty of .gz files but nothing dated after October 2016. I had noticed the dates before but thought that maybe these were the creation dates. I had backed up regularly right up till I did the re-installation (8th December 2018).

During my panic trying to reinstall, I may have clicked "backup now" - which might have compounded the problem irretrievably.

Anyway, in greater detail ...

At the backup drive's top level I have

  • a folder bearing the machine's name: bob-thinkpad-X61

    • this contains just 3 very small files (a sigtar.gz, a difftar.gz and a manifest, all dated 8th December 2018 (the date of my restoration failure - and possible "backup now" mistake). None of these is bigger than 327K (which would fit with a backup with nothing to back up).

  • Backups folder

  • initrd.img (created 9th August 2016, 36.2MB - and a locked copy with the suffix .old)

  • and a bunch of locked folders (bin, boot, cdrom etc) plus vmlinuz and vmlinuz.old

Inside Backups, I have

  • duplicity-full.20160919T114216Z.manifest (3.6 MB text, dated 19 sept 2016)

  • duplicity-full.20160919T114216Z.vol1.difftar.gz (plus 212 others: vol numbers 1-213, all but the last are 52.4 MB and all dated 19 sept 2016)

  • another sequence of approx 270 archives whose names start with "duplicity-inc"

  • Finally, 5 sigtar.gz files with names that begin "duplicity-new-signatures"

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Fortunately all the really critical stuff was on DropBox, but it's annoying to have lost all the other stuff. Is there a way of extracting the missing stuff? By the size of the backup files, I'd have thought it should be in there somewhere!

Ant thoughts warmly appreciated.

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  • I'd like to help, but this confuses me: " backup disk's home folder " Did your 75G backup disk have an installation on it, or was it simply a data disk? It's unclear to me why your backup disk had a home folder on it. Or are the "external disk" and the "backup disk" two different disks?
    – Organic Marble
    Jan 25, 2019 at 18:00
  • You can also try sudo duplicity collection-status file://[location of your backup directory] to get a status of the backups.
    – Organic Marble
    Jan 25, 2019 at 18:10

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