[Discuss] Cannot restore from Backintime (Ubuntu)

[Patrick]

On Sat, 08 Feb 2014 07:16:53 -0800
Murray Strome wrote:

[...]
> Success!!! -- well mostly. I found that the .thunderbird (as well as .mozilla and .kompozer) folders actually were backed up OK.  The problem was with the permissions. I had used Backintime (root) to do the backups.  While I was able to simply copy most files and folders from the snapshots created by Backintime, it failed in copying lots of things from the E-Mail, etc. folders.  It turns out that there were two problems: 1) in the backup, the files were owned by root; and 2) most of the files were marked as read only.  Once I used sudo cp to copy them over to the home directory, then changed the ownership and group to {user} (using sudo chown -R and sudo chgrp -R) and then changing the permissions to let owner write, things are back to normal.

That's strange, because rsync [and cp for that matter] will
preserve ownership, permissions, and mod-times if you tell it
to.  Guess it depends how Backintime was configured...

Somewhat restrictive permissions would make sense, btw, since
it's your private email.  A lot of config files are marked with
owner-only permissions [where others aren't even allowed to read,
let alone write to these files], but read-only for the *owner*
seems a bit silly.  BTW, if you're feeling paranoid, you can;
	chmod 700 ~
but that might render any network-shared files/dirs inaccessible.

> The only things I lost were the E-Mails between the last time I had done a backup and when the disk got messed up a couple of days later.  I now have that HD in an external USB case and have been fooling around with recovery tools to see if I can recover the original files.  Nothing has worked yet!
> 
> The partition is there, but corrupt. I believe that most, if not all, of the files are still on the disk but the tools I have tried have not been able to get at them. Testdisk finds the partition OK, but detects as a Sun-OS, though it is type 83 (Linux). However, when trying to repair/recover it, it says that is not supported. I also tried Photorec and Foremost without success.

I fried an HFS+ [Macintosh] partition a few years ago, trying
to mount it from Linux.  I only tried that once, btw, although
it does handle the older HFS [no `+'] format okay.  Seemed to
recognize it as another partition type, tried to mount it as
that, but no files showed up.  Then, when I plugged it into the
Mac again... no files showed up.  :-\

I haven't tried to recover damaged partitions, just grabbed what
I could when things started to go funny, and hoped there was a
spare copy lying around somewhere, of anything I might want to
keep.

Kind of like trying to snarf down all your leftovers before they
go bad.  Sometimes it works; sometimes they still wind up in the
trash.

> 
> At least I can carry on (I reinstalled LINUX on another HD so that I could continue to play with the old one).

Happy hunting.  :-)

My backup script seems to work okay.  The initial backup takes a
while, but subsequent snapshots usually whiz by in less than a
minute [depends how much has changed since the last snapshot].
Running it as a cron job, it generated a lot of mail, so I had to
quiet down some of the programs it uses.

Still can't figure out how to `silence' partimage, except to
redirect its output [on stderr] to /dev/null .  It doesn't accept
some options as documented.  Honestly, it's a bit goofy, but seems
to work.

Thanks again, for mentioning Grsync, btw.  :-)  The rsync manpage
was a little intimidating, but with a simplified way to generate
a coherent rsync command [via Grsync], I was able to start with
that, and add a couple of options not provided for in the GUI,
--exclude especially.


> 
> Murray

Patrick.
-- 
Allen's Axiom:
	When all else fails, read the instructions.