Single User computer: No backup files or signature chains found, 30 CollectionsError

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1

Hi, Been a bad week. Hope someone can find me a light at the end of a tunnel, any tunnel.

The errors discovered in order:

  • Ownership of the “duplicity-. . .” files was the User [corrected to root:root]
  • “No backup files found”
  • “ERROR 30 CollectionsError . . . qy: No signature chains found” at end of the “Debug Information” file.

WHAT WAS DONE

  1. The backup of /Home was created with Ubuntu’s 18.04 LTS “Déjà Dup Backups” to an external USB 2 TiB SSD.
    [Likely the equivalent of a native Déjà Dup version 36.2 or earlier]
  2. Used the Ubuntu Live installer which reformatted the entire internal HDD
  3. Created clean install of Ubuntu 2022.04.5 on the same machine.

WHAT WAS EXPECTED

  1. Launch Déjà Dup Backups ver: 42.9-1ubuntu3
  2. The files would be found and recognized on the external USB 2 TiB SSD.
  3. /Home successfully restored and accessible on the internal HDD.

WHAT DID HAPPEN

  1. Launched Déjà Dup Backups ver: 42.9-1ubuntu31
  2. set Restore folder as /media/user/UnWBackup/user-HP-8200-bak/
  3. set Target folder as /home/user/
  4. Clicked [Search]
  5. “Scanning” followed by “No backup files found”
  6. Checked Ownership of the “duplicity-. . .” file folder and files.
  7. Confirmed restore folder was and is full of “duplicity-full.20241212T160545Z.vo . . .” files.
  8. discovered ownership was user:user
  9. Changed ownership to root:root using
    “sudo chown -R root:root /media/anne/UnWBackup/anne-HP-8200-bak/”
  10. Spot checked folder and files. Found those checked to be owned by root:root
  11. Clicked [Search]
  12. “Scanning” followed by “No backup files found” and lots more reading.
  13. Found “About” page + “Debug Information” link.
  14. Scanned the 379 line file briefly containing:
    • [About 30] "DEBUG 1 Found orphaned set . Found orphaned set . . .;
    • [3] Warning, found the following local orphaned signature files:
    • [1] Warning, found incomplete backup sets, probably left from aborted session
    • [5] Short entries: [2] NOTICE 1, INFO 3, DEBUG 1, INFO 1
  15. At end the following:
    “ERROR 30 CollectionsError . . . qy: No signature chains found” with a trace back file

The Big Questions.
How could I have caused Deja Dup to create nothing but disconnected orphans? The backup folder looked all in order. My small test backups & restores were successful.

I am coming to you like other tech writers brought their 5.5 inch diskettes to me, asking in shaky voices, “Can you find my file?”

And especially important:
What do I need to supply so I can help you in helping me? **

Thank you for your time just reading this
Luigi
luigiwriter2@gmail.com

** an 80 yr old now easily confused 16-bit x-gru with too many USN TBI’s for his taste.

1 Like
2

Hello and sorry that Déjà Dup is giving you a bad time.

Let’s see. First off, the ownership of the files shouldn’t really matter for this case. So it’s alright that they were the user. And it’s alright that they are root now.

Second, the “no backup file found” / the “orphaned” messages. That sounds like (for whatever reason) there is a critical file missing from the backup files, like a .manifest file or something. Can you provide a list of files in the backup folder? It might be a lot. In which case maybe leave out all the “volXXX” files (volume files that hold the meat and potatoes file data).

Third, one avenue of exploration is using Duplicity directly. There’s a section on the wiki about that: Manual Restore · Wiki · World / Déjà Dup Backups · GitLab

You don’t necessarily need to jump to that right away, we can debug a little bit back and forth first, but if that doesn’t seem too daunting, you could also try that. It will probably result in the same error, but good to try.

3

HI, I agree.

I have got the list to show in the Terminal. I have not done a pipe to file output in more than 2 decades I think. Your request “Can you provide a list of files in the backup folders filtering out all the “volXXX” files seemed to me a rather simple thing to do. I searched for “Linux:print ls with filter to file”

After 9 browser tabs of reading and six command line tries, starting with

ls | grep ^Account

and ``ending with

ls –ignore="full.*.vol"

I have failed to produce a list with the “-full” files absent. Every formula like the above, has included what I was working to filter out, filtering out what I was attempting to include.

The last one above I tried returned 677 names, however 56 were actually “ duplicity-new-signatures. . . . .” files. In desperation I copied the different file lists out of the long version and pasted them into 2 text files.

I am admitting defeat of doing it with one command-line

Realizing now I have done manually really what you asked, I am going to attach the lists of manifest and signature files to my reply email as I do not see a way of uploading the file lists to discourse.gnome.org/.

In skimming the lists nothing has jumped out at me as all the files names seem consistent. I am assuming it is the last two types for which you are asking.

duplicity-_full.20241212T160545Z.vol494._difftar.gz

duplicity-inc.20231205T053200Z.to.20231207T134238Z.vol1.difftar.gz

Plus finding this number of manifest and signature sigtar.gz files

56 duplicity-inc.20231205T053200Z.to.20231207T134238Z.manifest

56 duplicity-new-signatures.20231205T053200Z.to.20231207T134238Z.sigtar.gz

<sub>My impression is that</sub>``<sub>’s a lot, but perhaps not for about three years of backups.</sub>

Let me know what next steps to take.

Luigi

🤓L. P. Luigi Espenlaub.
luigiwriter2@gmail.com
Passed 80% of a Century mark. My neck was broken. Almost blown up in the Bermuda Triangle, Thinking “Death Has A Love / Hate Relationship With Me” might be a good Auto-Bio title.

(Attachment duplicity signature files.txt is missing)

(Attachment Duplisity Manafest file list.txt is missing)

5

Hmm, those attachments didn’t come through. Can you send them to my email at mike@mterry.name ? Thanks.

So it’s been a while since I dived into the deep internals of Duplicity. But orphaned backup sets usually refers to an incremental volume file that isn’t connected to a “full” volume set.

By way of explanation… Duplciity writes an initial full snapshot to disk (files with filenames that look like duplicity-full-*) and then further snapshots are “incremental” and they only store the changes from the initial full snapshot. And it keeps a whole chain of these incremental snapshots going, until you ask for a new full snapshot.

So if Duplicity is complaining about “orphaned” sets, it usually means that there is an incremental file on disk but without the original thing that it is incremental to. But it sounds like you have lots of duplicity files laying around…

I have two questions for you:

  1. When you see this error on the Restore page, is there a Date picker at the bottom right like this, or is it just blank on the bottom right of the Restore page? I’m expecting it to be blank, but if you see the date chooser and the “no backups found” message, that would be interesting to me.

image

  1. Since you’re already digging around in the Terminal, can you run the following command for me to just get Deja Dup out of the way at least and use raw Duplicity:
duplicity collection-status file:///media/user/UnWBackup/user-HP-8200-bak/

Do those results look sane or do you get the same error message?

6

Hi again

Ran the Deja Dup restore after upgrading to 24.04.2again and got a different message after a much longer search time.

The bottom of the page is blank save for the grayed out [Restore] button.

image.png
image.png538×122 4.18 KB

Have to say, This is my kind of error message.

Question 1: No date picker. Only grayed out [Restore] button at bottom left.

Question 2: The command and and reply:

. . . 8200:/$ duplicity collection-status file:///media/user/UnWBackup/user-HP-8200-bak/

Giving up after 1 attempt. FileNotFoundError: No such file or directory

Question 3: Do those results look sane or do you get the same error message?

Ans: Looks puzzling to me: the new message in Deja Dup “Permission denied” vs

Duplicity collection-status file: “No such file or directory”

Together, the messages seem to indicate, the directory and files exist, but Eh? Do not exist.

If Deja Dup is dependent on duplicity for messages [ . . .]? Beyond asking, :I’m not really qualified to speculate on causes.

I am attaching new copies of the signature and manifest file plus the “debugging information” log generated with today’s Ubuntu 24.04.2 Deja Dup version 45.2.

A thought. Would downloading the 47.0 flatpak version from https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.DejaDup

possibly help?

(Attachment duplicity signature files 2025-03-05.txt is missing)

(Attachment Duplisity Manafest file list 2025-03-05.txt is missing)

(Attachment duplicity deja-dup-debug 2025-03-06; upgr 24.04.2 .txt is missing)

7

Ah well, it looks like you are pointing Deja Dup at file:///media/lpluigi/UnWBackup/anne-hp-8200/ but I had told you to use file:///media/user/UnWBackup/user-HP-8200-bak/ (based off your earlier message.

So those two tests were pointing at different places. Is the first one the correct location for the files? Permission denied is interesting, that sounds like your user can’t access the files there. If you open the Files app, can you navigate to the drive and look at the files in there?

Try the duplicity collection-status command with the same path and you should hopefully get the same permission denied error:

duplicity collection-status file:///media/lpluigi/UnWBackup/anne-hp-8200/

… maybe? It might be worth a try, since it does bundle in a much newer version of Duplicity.

These attachments still aren’t getting through to Discourse. I’d recommend emailing them directly to me at mike@mterry.name

8

Sorry I was too tired and I was not careful enough to notice the difference and ensure what went with “8200” was correct.
I also found that Gmail hates *.txt files for some reason. Later today [it is now 00:54 Saturday] I will convert *.txt to *.pdf. Also I promise to very carefully copy and paste the paths you need.
Thank you for your patience.