I’ve been regularly backing up my new F42 installation with the default backup tool. Just now it occurred to me that I should just have a quick look at my backups to make sure I really was backing my files up. So, I opened up the utility and clicked “Browse Backups.” After entering my encryption password at the resulting prompt and choosing a particular backup, I got the following error message:
Where are the backups stored? What file system is used at the backup location? Has the location been mounted successfully? Can you access the backup location using Files?
Check
which fusermount3
If it doesn’t exist, install
sudo dnf install fuse3 fuse3-libs
It could also be a permission or SELinux issue. Do you know how to diagnose?
The backups are on an external HDD. It is mounted, and I can readily view it in Files.
The output of
which fusermount3
produces
/usr/bin/fusermount3
Now that I think about it, what makes this problem even weirder is that the way I got my files into my F42 installation in the first place was by restoring from a Deja Dup backup of my old Ubuntu installation (I’m new to Fedora).
I know what permissions are and how to change them (chmod), but I don’t know what permissions I might need to look at or where. I have no idea how to diagnose SELinux problems… Any hints would be appreciated!
I hate to impose further on you by asking such a dumb question, but I’m stumped: How do I run it from the command line? I’ve tried the following commands:
deja-dup: “bash: deja-dup: command not found”
backup: same result
restic: “bash: /usr/bin/restic: No such file or directory”
The reason I tried restic is that I understand deja-dup is actually just a front end for something else, and, per the project’s homepage, it defaults to restic in recent versions.
Running man -k backup doesn’t produce any options that I recognize.
P.S. Is it possibly relevant that I’ve installed deja-dup as a Fedora flatpak rather than either a Flathub flatpak or an RPM?
yes - it’s available as an rpm, a flatpak and a flatpak from flathub.
I’d install it from rpm and try it again if I were you - you may well find that all of a sudden, your “but it’s right there in /usr/bin” issues may well vanish!
Yes, indeed.
It could be a permission issue - a flatpak doesn’t necessarily have access to the filesystem.
Install flatseal from flathub to check permissions or just install it as rpm (and remove the flatpak version).
Restic is indeed the back-end that DejaDup switched to in recent versions, but if a backup was set up with the older Duplicity, DejaDup won’t switch to Restic automatically (even if the updated version would otherwise default to the latter), for obvious reasons (the two formats are not compatible).
You can tell if you’re on a Restic back-end, if the backup folder contains the following subfolders: snapshots / locks / keys / index / data.
Thank you very much, Steve Flynn & Flo. I installed the RPM version and ran it. It did not recognize my existing backup but created a new one. I then ran it again and created a slightly newer backup, giving me two in total. I than started the restore procedure, and was offered the choice of the two backups, which is the behavior I was expecting. So, problem solved.
Though I just (re)installed Deja Dup, I see none of the folders you mention in my backup folder, leading me to believe that Deja Dup is still using Duplicity. I would rather use Restic, if that’s more modern. Any ideas on how I can force Deja Dup to use Restic?
I personally use restic from the command line (well, an alias, but you get the idea). A backup for me is restic backup /home/steve --exclude-file ~/.config/restic/excludes. I could run it on a cron or a systemd.timer but I just run it when I’ve done enough to warrant taking a backup.
A restore is pretty much the same, as you’d expect.
I set the restic repository and the encryption password with two lines in my shell environment variables, and I have a list of directories to be excluded in that “excludes” file listed in the command itself.
I’m using Deja-Dup from Flathub, which defaults now to Restic. See this post introducing the change. Before that, I remember that there was a toggle in Preferences somewhere to use Restic as an experimental feature.
When I did that switch to use restic as an experimental feature, it always whinged about not having a password on the backup, which I had… and to use a switch to override that failure condition. After trying to convince the thing I really did have a password set for about 10 minutes, I took the easy way out, kicked daja-dup into the bin and went to restic from the CLI.
Ahh, yes, the Labs tab of the Preferences menu in the RPM version allows selection of Restic. However, it is still described as experimental. The RPM is version 46.1, which I see is way behind the times, since the current version, according to the project website, is 49.2. Maybe I’ll make another attempt at getting the flatpak version to work. I’m guessing that’ll have to be the one from Flathub if I want the latest version.
