Ubuntu
backintime package

BiT no longer sees snapshots after fresh install

Asked by Brendan_P

Hi Folks,

I have about a year's worth of backups that I can't seem to access any longer. Here's what happened:

- Was running Ubuntu 14.04 and BiT
- Did snapshots to a sshfs mounted drive on my local network and used local encryption to encrypt the files (I could never get ssh too work with BiT)
- There was about year's worth of snapshots all working as expected
- Wiped Ubuntu 14.04 and installed Ubuntu Gnome 15.10
- Wiped most of my apps config settings (wanted a clean start)
- Restored (from a manual saved copy) ~/.config/backintime to my home dir
- Installed BiT from repo
- On first run encfs was not installed so had to install that
- Able to open the snapshots folder, but none of my snapshots are visible. I can see the encrypted folder in the snapshots dir but in BiT none of the backups are listed.

My goal, to access these old backups. Mainly for a sense of security, i.e. knowing that if I need to reinstall my system due to a fatel HDD issue or loose all my data... I can actually get it back via my backups! ;)

Thanks in advance.

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Ubuntu backintime Edit question
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Brendan_P
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Revision history for this message
Germar (germar) said : 		#1

Please deactivate 'Auto Host/User/Profile ID' in Settings and change 'Host' and 'Username' to those from your old installation.

Revision history for this message
Brendan_P (brendan-p) said : 		#2

Thanks for the tip and apologies for the delayed reply.

That alone did not work for me, however it did help in that I was able to figure out the following:

a) That the encrypted folder was being mounted correctly and that the backups where in fact there (in the folder). However they where not being displayed in BiT.

The encfs folder structure looked similar to this:
dr-xr-xr-x 1 myuser myuser 4096 Dec 4 14:17 20151204-122721-104 <--- old snapshot
dr-xr-xr-x 1 myuser myuser 4096 Dec 11 13:50 20151211-112409-462 <--- old snapshot
dr-xr-xr-x 1 myuser myuser 4096 Dec 22 10:04 20151222-080632-637 <--- old snapshot
drwxrwxrwx 1 myuser myuser 4096 Jan 8 08:09 new-hostname <--- new host name backup folder
lrwxrwxrwx 1 myuser myuser 19 Dec 22 10:20 last_snapshot -> 20151222-080632-637
drwxrwxrwx 1 myuser myuser 4096 Jan 8 08:28 old-hostname <--- newly created (by BiT) OLD host name backup folder

b) So it seemed to me that BiT was looking for old snapshots in the wrong place. I.e. it was looking in ../hostname/ folder rather than the root of the encrypted folder.

*I'm not sure if this is a bug or a misconfiguration on my part at time point.*

c) If I moved the old snapshot folders to the new host name folder, under my username and ID, they where displayed in BiT and worked as expected. I had some issues with permissions initially when trying to move the folders but just made sure I had read/write access to those folders and I was then able to move them.

So the good news, all is working as expected now. The issue is resolved for me and I'm confident in BiT and my ability to restore from previous snapshots.

That said, I think this may be a bug but...I may also have misconfigured something...at some point...I'm not sure.

A usability suggestion might be that on first run BiT offers to scan available snapshots in the backup destination folder and offers some sort of option to choose if you want to use any of the previous snapshots or start fresh.

Thanks for again for the tip and for the developers who build a really nice backup solution.

Revision history for this message
Germar (germar) said : 		#3

There shouldn't be any '[new|old]-hostname' folders together with the snapshot folders. If they are they are probably leftovers from previous config attempts.

Back In Time in version >= 1.1.0 already comes with an assistant which will help you restore your config on first start and also doesn't have that confusing 'Auto Host/User/Profile ID' setting anymore.