Deja-Dup backups and Thunderbird: usual process unsuccessful because of permission?

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Hi all,

I carefully saved my data with Deja-Dup Backups on an external drive, especially my Thunderbird one. But before I gave the restore process a try, my laptop crashed, and I got a new desktop PC.

Every time I tried the automatic restoration function of Deja-Dup Backups for Thunderbird data, it gave me this error message:

Could not restore the following files. Please make sure you are able to write to them:

I tried to run Deja-Dup Backups as sudo, but it doesn’t change the outcomes. As it doesn’t work (no old emails or personal folders in Thunderbird), I tried to restore the Deja-Dup Backups files to a folder in my Home, then to copy and paste the content to /home/davidgb/.cache/thunderbird and to /home/davidgb/.thunderbird
Changing of directory doesn’t seem to impact the issue, as Backups gives me the same error message with this list of files:

Could not restore the following files. Please make sure you are able to write to them:
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/Mail/Local Folders/Travail DGB.sbd/NS Administratif.msf
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/Mail/pop.gmail.com/Inbox
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/Mail/pop.gmail.com/Inbox.msf
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/Mail/pop.gmail.com/Junk
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/calendar-data/cache.sqlite-wal
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/datareporting/aborted-session-ping
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/folderCache.json
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/places.sqlite-wal
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/prefs.js
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/session.json
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/session.json.backup
/home/davidgb/Downloads/Thunderbird resto/24d13kxu.default-release/storage-sync-v2.sqlite-wal

But doing that has created another problem, as Thunderbird cannot launch anymore and gives the message:

<html id="messengerWindow" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
^

I am lost and need help. Do you understand the problem?

Thank you in advance!

2

Hey,
I’ve just tried that with my backup of the thunderbird-flatpak into some directory and it worked. Are you also using the thunderbird flatpak? And which version of Deja-Dup do you use? I have just checked and the one in the fedora-repos is two major versions behind - maybe you could update to the flatpak from flathub if that’s not what you’ve installed already?

Then maybe try to restore it again, but without sudo and to a clean directory that you have write-permission for.

The issue with thunderbird not starting anymore likely originates in it’s data directories currently being broken (new and old things copied over each other etc…), you’ll probably have to completely remove them, then restore them from the backup, and only then try to launch it again.

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4

You could also check which back-end your version of Deja-Dup is using (duplicity or restic), and try restoring with the back-end CLI tool. If still not working, maybe the error messages would be more detailed.

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