Back in Time won't start

Question

After I accidentally made a computer shutdown during an not finished backup Back in Time wont start again, I also installed and deinstalled some programs using python. Here is the error message I get:

frank@VaioVGN-FE21H:~$ backintime-qt4

Back In Time
Version: 1.1.20

Back In Time comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; type `backintime --license' for details.

> Traceback (most recent call last):   
File
> "/usr/share/backintime/qt4/app.py", line 1509, in <module>
>     cfg = backintime.start_app( 'backintime-qt4' )   
File "/usr/share/backintime/common/backintime.py", line 463, in start_app
>     return getConfig(args, False)   
File "/usr/share/backintime/common/backintime.py", line 584, in getConfig
>     cfg = config.Config(args.config)  
File "/usr/share/backintime/common/config.py", line 189, in __init__
>     self.append( self._LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH )   
File "/usr/share/backintime/common/configfile.py", line 393, in append
>     super(ConfigFileWithProfiles, self).append(filename)   
File "/usr/share/backintime/common/configfile.py", line 115, in append
>     lines = f.readlines()   
File "/usr/lib/python3.5/codecs.py", line 321, in decode
>     (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final) UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x9a in position
> 1: invalid start byte

More information, which might be useful to analyze the problem:

• I run Lubuntu 16.04.2,on a old Vaio the kernel is 4.4.0-77-generic
• Synaptic Package Manager says that there are no dependency problems
• Back in Time starts as ROOT
• I deinstalled and reinstalled the program

Thanks for helping! Frank

Answer 1

Your /root/.config/backintime/config file got corrupted. Please remove it sudo rm /root/.config/backintime/config and restart BackInTime. It will ask if you want to restore your config. Confirm to restore and choose your last snapshot folder to restore from.