Back In Time

Permissions not restored correctly using rsync

Asked by Russell Almond

I recently had a serious problem where I needed to reinstall the software. Fortunately all of my files were backed up using BiT. However, there is no real guide for how to do restoration, especially before I've setup BiT again.

The obvious thing to try was to drill down into the BiT disk and find the entry with the latest date/time stamp, then to do
sudo rsync -ahv home/ /home
(Actually my situation was somewhat more complex as I was trying to to restore my preferences, so I wanted to avoid restoring the .xxx files).
The problem is that the permissions are wrong, even with the -a option to rsync. In particular, all of my files were write protected, which caused no end of problems.

Is there some other mechanism that BiT uses to save permissions? If so, how do I restore permissions?
If I need to do it through the configuration, is there an easy way to restore the configuration from the backup disk?

Thanks,
   --Russell Almond

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Germar (germar) said : 		#1

BIT stores permissions in an extra file (fileinfo.bz2). To restore you can either manually configure BIT like it was before or you can copy the old config-file back in place. Assuming your backup drive is '/media/backup' you will find the config in '/media/backup/backintime/HOST/USER/PROFILE_ID/SNAPSHOT_ID/config'. Copy this to '/home/USER/.config/backintime/'.
If the snapshot list is still empty after that you can deactivate 'Auto Host / User / Profile Id' and change e.g. 'Host' to be the hostname of your old installation.

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Russell Almond (almond-m) said : 		#2

This doesn't quite answer my question, because I run BiT as root.

So the actual path is
/media/USER/DRIVE/backintime/HOST/root/PROFILE_ID/SNAPSHOT_ID/config
but do I need to copy this to /home/USER/.config/backintime or somewhere else?

Then is there a way to suspend automatic backups until I'm sure the system is stable again?

You badly need an FAQ for doing a clean reinstall. Also, a menu item to recover the config from the backup disk would be extremely useful.

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Germar (germar) said : 		#3

For root account the path is /root/.config/backintime/

If you just copy the config back to that location there will be no automatic backups. The cronjob that will start backups will only be created if you press OK in Settings. So if you don't touch Settings it will never run. Otherwise you can change the plan to 'disabled' before pressing OK.

An option to automatically find config is already on my todo list. Next release will come with a '--config' option so you don't need to copy the file in the correct position anymore but start BIT with e.g. 'backintime-gnome --config /path/to/config'.

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