I’m using the Flatpak version of Déjà Dup, version 46.1 on Pop!_OS 22.04.
I’m trying to backup via SSH to a remote Ubuntu 24.04 server, to an 8TB external harddisk. Unfortunately, the backup process is forever stuck at the stage “Preparing”.
Before attaching the harddisk to the Ubuntu server, I made a full backup to the 8TB disk while it was attached directly to my computer. This worked perfectly fine. Also, I previously successfully backed up via SSH to another Ubuntu server that was running in my home network.
SSH access to the remote server works a) in the command line and b) in Nautilus (Gnome Files). Why does it not work in Déjà Dup then, and why is there no error message?
I disabled password-login on the remote server’s SSH demon, only access via rsa key on my computer is possible. But regarding the problem I describe, this apparently did not make a difference.
DEJA_DUP_DEBUG=1 flatpak run org.gnome.DejaDup > dejadup-log-output.md
And then started the backup. After about 15min of “Preparing”, I pressed pause. The resulting (large) text file can be downloaded here: https://murena.io/s/TDT9ckifySwG4ed
I don’t see anything unusual in that log. The backups are very large - several full backups of 6000+ volume files. And maybe chewing through that amount of metadata is slow.
The last thing in that log is kicking off a dry-run backup to calculate the progress bar size.
This might just be duplicity being a bit slow with that size of a backup repository…?
One experiment to try is enabling the experimental Restic backend and making a backup using that (Preferences → Labs). It should be a fair bit faster.
Hi, and thanks for the great inputs. I successfully tried two things:
Small test backup using Duplicity works fine - so the “endless” preparing after all is, as to your suggestion, probably not endless, but just takes a long time due to the large backup size (towards 2TB).
Restic starts working fine on the large backup. I paused it for now, because the full backup just takes a very long time. Also did a small test backup and restore using Restic, and that worked marvellously.
Apart from Restic apparently working fine, one thing that is a bit odd (and confusing for the first-time user) is that while backing up, some files seem to not appear in the “Details”, while others appear multiple times:
