Tails

#4 Updated by intrigeri 2015-08-28 10:46:05

I’m curious how one can restore backups of files owned e.g. by root (such as APT stuff) with deja-dup, without ending up with dangerous ownership/permissions. We’re be lucky if everything has permissions open enough to be backup’ed in the first place (not sure if it’s a good idea to add this requirement to any new persistence feature so that this pre-condition holds).

Granted, these are problems shared by all backup software that run the actual backup code in the same process as the GUI, but better mention it now rather than too late :)

#5 Updated by sajolida 2015-08-31 05:23:37

Yes, I has these permissions issues in mind. I need to sit down and think about them in depth.

But for example, the date in the “APT stuff” has very different status than the data in “Persistent” when conceiving disastrous data loss. For example, I personally don’t mind loosing everything I have in /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked/apt/.

#6 Updated by sajolida 2015-08-31 05:33:58

Today I restored a file to a previous version. It took quite a while to perform, probably because of duplicity’s internals and because it’s remote. But the integration in Nautilus and the increments are very nice.

#7 Updated by intrigeri 2015-09-01 01:52:38

> But for example, the date in the “APT stuff” has very different status than the data in “Persistent” when conceiving disastrous data loss.

Absolutely. Sadly, that might not be the case for all non-amnesia-owned files that users make persistent, though (either through existing presets, such as NM connections, future ones, or manually added persistent directories).

#8 Updated by intrigeri 2015-09-01 01:53:04

> Today I restored a file to a previous version. It took quite a while to perform, probably because of duplicity’s internals and because it’s remote. But the integration in Nautilus and the increments are very nice.

Sounds exciting :) I wasn’t aware of the integration in Nautilus, what is it doing?

#11 Updated by intrigeri 2015-09-01 08:23:26

> Regarding the desktop integration, see screenshots in attachment. You can restore files and folders to previous version by doing right-click in Nautilus.

Lovely, thanks!

#13 Updated by sajolida 2015-12-01 06:52:07

Another issues with deja-dup in Tails is about saving the dotfiles:

• You can only add files to be backed up by Deja-Dup (and not single files)
• If files are mounted or linked in a different place, you can only restore from Nautilus the original places backed up by Deja Dup.

So in the case of Dotfiles, it works to back up /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked/dotfiles/ but they you can’t restore them from Nautilus.

#14 Updated by intrigeri 2015-12-01 13:08:35

> * You can only add files to be backed up by Deja-Dup (and not single files)

Uh?

#15 Updated by sajolida 2015-12-02 02:07:09

>> * You can only add files to be backed up by Deja-Dup (and not single files)
>
> Uh?

Broken rewritten sentence, should be « You can only add folders to be
backed up by Deja-Dup (and not single files) »

#16 Updated by sajolida 2016-06-05 01:29:11

Another limitation, at least in Jessie, is that, when backups are triggered automatically, for example, by inserting the destination device, there is no feedback whatsoever on the progress of the backup. You only get a notification when the backup can start and when it’s done, but nothing inbetween.

#17 Updated by sajolida 2016-07-01 10:46:36

Today I had to restore all my files from my deja-dup backups due to a broken support. The restoring went quite well; I took screenshots but forget to save them :)

The process goes like this:

# Install the new support.

# Configure persistence on the new support like it was on the old support. If you have custom persistence setting right now it’s not possible to backup or restore them.

* Fix persistence.conf if you had other custom folders. Otherwise they will get restored in $HOME before being mounted from persistence.

1. Restart and enable persistence.
2. Install deja-dup.
3. Choose “Restore”, point to the backup storage, and specify to restore to the “original location”.
4. Restart.

Issues:

• Deja-Dup seems to fail to restore any symlinks. At the end of the process it displayed a long list of failed files, most of them refering to symlinks. It didn’t look nice.
• The bits of persistence that are not read-write by amnesia cannot be handled by this. See Bug #10145. In my setup the most annoying bit was live-additional-software.conf :)