deja dup backup restore has failed me

Solution 1:

Ensure your external hard drive is connected, powered and mounted. If this is the case you should be able to view to files in Nautilus, the File Manager.

Then you should find the location of the folder you backed your files up to. Navigate there using Nautilus, such that you are in the folder with all the compressed backup files. Now press ctrl+L to bring up the current directory in text form. Now copy that directory.

Open the terminal (ctrl+alt+T) and type:
duplicity list-current-files "file://PasteLocationHere" > backuplist.txt

(to paste into a terminal right click and select paste or use ctrl+shift+V)

So for example it might look like:

duplicity list-current-files "file:///media/HD1TB/backup folder" > backuplist.txt

Now what we can do is open the file this just generated called backuplist.txt (by running the command gedit backuplist.txt or nano backuplist.txt) and this will tell us which directories we have backed up on our hard drive. Now what we can do is look down that list for a directory we want to restore and copy the directory. For example the file might look like this:

Local and Remote metadata are synchronized, no sync needed.
Last full backup date: Sun Jan  5 14:25:20 2014
Wed Feb 19 21:21:58 2014 .
Sat Jan  4 17:15:24 2014 home
Mon Mar  3 13:56:33 2014 home/jamie
Thu Feb 27 14:41:17 2014 home/jamie/Documents
Thu Feb 27 14:41:17 2014 home/jamie/Documents/important_form.odt
Thu Feb 27 14:41:04 2014 home/jamie/Documents/untitled1.txt
Thu Feb 13 08:29:22 2014 home/jamie/Desktop/Timetable.odt
Wed Feb 12 16:52:27 2014 home/jamie/Desktop/Timetable.pdf
Thu Feb 27 10:00:24 2014 home/jamie/test.py

And now we can choose one of those folders (say home/jamie/Documents) to restore. To do this, copy the directory you want to restore and run the command:

duplicity --file-to-restore "home/jamie/Documents/" "file:///media/HD1TB/backup folder" "/home/jamie/restoreFolder" --no-encryption (restoreFolder should not already exist before running the command). You should replace jamie with your user name (it's written in the terminal, something like: jamie@Cooper:~$ where it's userName@computerName:~$

Now if you open up the folder in your home directory called: restoreFolder you should see all the files from the folder you wanted to restore.