backup with Dèja Dup and Duplicity returns an error

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 18.10 and the backup tool Dèja Dup

It returns the following error:

File "/usr/bin/duplicity", line 453, in <lambda> vol_num: put(tdp, dest_filename, vol_num),
File "/usr/bin/duplicity", line 342, in put backend.put(tdp, dest_filename)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/duplicity/backend.py", line 395, in inner_retry % (n, e.__class__.__name__, util.uexc(e)))
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/duplicity/util.py", line 79, in uexc
return ufn(unicode(e).encode('utf-8'))
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 37: ordinal not in range(128)

Answer 1

(Partial answer and extended comment)

I have run into the same error. It's a Unicode vs. ascii encoding issue and the bug report can be found here, with more info in the comments.

A fix has already been committed in duplicity 0.8. However, unfortunately the Ubuntu repositories only contain duplicity 0.7 as of now; here's the version running on my machine:

$ duplicity --version
duplicity 0.7.17

So looks like for now we are stuck with the bug until duplicity 0.8. (But does anyone know how to update to the development version of duplicity?)

Also, it looks like the error is actually raised when attempting to report a different error. So there is an error somewhere in one of the files to be backed up; it's just that the error is not being reported, since it has some special character which isn't processed correctly.