crashed without error
Oh geeze!! Crashes are pretty rare and I’d love to fix this. Though if this is a real problem that is still getting in our way, we may want to move into “use duplicity directly, and then later worry about deja-dup’s hangups” territory, just so we can get to the point where you have your data.
But let’s try one more time with deja-dup to possibly get some useful data:
The log from Deja Dup is the wrong date, it seems using the command line doesn’t result in a log, or it’s stored elsewhere.
The crash might stop it from logging the results? You can get on-the-fly logging if you run the command line like so:
DEJA_DUP_DEBUG=1 deja-dup --restore ...
It’ll be a firehose, but that’s probably what we want right now.
when I use the command line, how should I specify the backed-up directory?
Both Pictures and /home/user/Pictures should be fine and equivalent (the former works as long as you’re running the command from /home/user). You’re specifying a path to the location of where the file was originally, either as a relative or absolute path.
Also, is there a way to restore all files through the command line?
Try --restore /home/user, but you’ll probably want to restore to a new location (not to original locations) because you don’t want to overwrite your current home files immediately, but rather move files from the restored set into place.
Duplicity
OK, let’s talk a little bit about what next steps are, if we want to pause debugging deja-dup for a second.
Let’s first set up rclone, which will expose your google drive account as a normal folder on your machine. This will let us interact with it more easily (and honestly, is probably easier than driving duplicity’s drive backend which gets a little technical).
rclone
You can probably install rclone from your distro. Then follow the following setup instructions (setting up a new remote called, let’s say gdrive and just using the default for most of the questions, to use the built-in default developer keys that rclone has):
Back to Duplicity
OK, now with that set up, we can do something like (note the lack of a slash in front of home/user):
duplicity restore --file-to-restore=home/user/Pictures rclone://gdrive:/path/to/backup/files /tmp/Pictures
