Desktop icons after backup

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I’m new to Déjà Dup. I used it yesterday for the first time. It ran an auto-backup again this morning. It has left two folders on my desktop that are strange to me. When I right-click on either, I get an “Unmount” option. Funny thing is, however, neither of these folders a) appear in ~/Desktop nor b) appear when I run “mount” So my questions are as follows:

  1. What are these?
  2. Where are they?
  3. Exactly what is mounted?
  4. Can I “Unmount” them?
  5. Will this happen every time Déjà Dup runs?
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Hello! Some quick background, then some possible answers.

If you back up to certain locations (like network servers or an external drive), Deja Dup has to first mount that location (which means, make it available for reading/writing to the system). For example, if you told Deja Dup to back up to an ssh server of yours, when Deja Dup starts, it will mount that location, and an icon will show up.

The fact that you didn’t see them when running mount is interesting though. GNOME might have a state where it knows the location is relevant to you, but has not officially mounted them. Deja Dup does usually unmount the location when it’s done, automatically. And maybe GNOME kept showing the icons in that case? Or maybe they are other known partitions of your external drive that aren’t mounted, but GNOME is showing them to you anyway?

  1. I’m guessing thats what those icons were. Does the name for the icons match that explanation?
  2. They aren’t really anywhere, in that case. Just possible mount locations. You can see icons on your Desktop and also if you open up the Files app, you should be able to see these mounted locations in the sidebar.
  3. The backup storage location (server / drive) gets mounted. Though it’s odd that there’s two icons, not one? That might make sense if your backup storage location is on an external drive - it might be showing an icon for each partition of the drive?
  4. Yes, you can unmount them safely through the UI if that open is available. Though if Deja Dup is using them at the moment, you might either interrupt its operation or the system might not let you unmount.
  5. Yes. There might be a setting somewhere in GNOME to not show such icons on the desktop, but I couldn’t find it in a quick scan.

Does that make sense? Are the names for the icons sensible at all?

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All this makes plenty of sense to me; thanks! I’m 100% comfortable with *NIX at the command line but some of these GUI apps … it seems that GNU/Linux is relying more and more on behind-the-scenes “hidden magic;” as time goes on, it’s all starting to feel a bit Windows-esque. That scares me.

When I open Files (Nautilus), It does show these two “items” on the sidebar! A hover-over of each shows smb://… for one and sftp://… for the other. So I guess these two “folders” aren’t actually mounted; it looks like they may be some internal-to-GNOME shortcuts.

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I don’t pretend to know how Déjà-Dup does its magic but I think what’s going on is this: I never access an SMB share using smbclient; I always mount -t cifs ... and go from there. It seems that when you access a remote share via Files (Nautilus specifically), you use a “mount-like” URL - e.g. smb://host/share - but behind the scenes, Nautilus never actually commits to a mount; it stores the URL internally and uses smblicent for all operations. This makes the experience [in Nautilus] very FTP/FileZilla-esque. I’m guessing that Déjà-Dup, too, uses smbclient to perform its file transfers when backing up to a remote (NAS) share. Perhaps Nautilus picks up on this activity and remembers the share URLs and displays them as “mounts.”

I’ve come to this conclusion after a recent session with Nautilus. I needed to transfer files from the desktop of my dying computer to my “new” workhorse. In Nautilus, I connected to the remote machine using an smb:// ... URL. Nautilus connected and added the share as a “mount point” on the side bar. While the file manager was loading the contents of the share, I quickly dropped to the command line and … no mount!

I’m satisfied. Thank you for your help!!

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I am fairly certain deja-dup (like Files) is using GIO/GVfs

Such filesystems can be accessible through fuse under /run/user/[uid]/gvfs/ having been mounted through the programmatic equivalent of gio mount and of course things using GIO to enumerate mounts (as Files does for the sidebar) will see them alongside your “traditional” mounts

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