How to restore duplicity backup from one hostname to another?

Question

I have been running scheduled backup from my 22.04 on one laptop which saves the files to google drive that is identified by the hostname, as far as I know. Is it possible to restore the content of this back to abother computer with different hostname? I name my computer after the laptop and CPU model. Imagine my current laptop is broken and I purchase a new one. The hostname changes due to different manufacturer and CPU model. In that case, how do I connect to the existing backup content in google drive and restore from it? Isn't that the purpose of backup?

Answer 1

You can, simply, use the Ubuntu Backups(the package name is deja-dup which is the graphical front-end to duplicity) GUI application which by default backs up your home directory and saves it under a folder named after your current host-name(this is just the parent folder's name and shouldn't affect the backed up data under it).

If you, later, chose to restore those backups on a new computer with a different host-name but under the same user name ... then all you need to do is launch the Backups app on the new computer and click on Restore From a Previous Backup button then, choose where your previous backups are stored e.g. Google Drive and specify your old host-name in the Folder field like so:

then, follow the onscreen instructions and your old home directory should be restored fine as long as the user name you choose on the new computer is the same as the user name used on the old computer … This, however, doesn’t mean you can’t restore under a different user name but, then you might need to manually fix some issues e.g. old pathnames if you have used any.

In short, it’s not the host-name that you need to worry about but, rather issues/conflicts with configuration files for certain applications e.g. web-browsers, email-clients and audio … etc. that might arise when restoring under a different Ubuntu release.