Bionic obsoletes sbackup, makes restore impossible

[Simon Lambourn]

With no warning in the release notes (as far as I could see), upgrading to Bionic has removed and prevented re-installation of Simple Backup, sbackup.
A message "Removed, Core functionality" or something similar, was presented in the "remove packages" detail screen.

However this seems to prevent restoration of any backups created by Simple Backup. So not only do users have to configure a different backup solution, they have also lost access to all their backup history.

Was this considered, and if so is there some guidance available to affected users? If not, there probably should be, at least to recover or migrate the backups.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:18.04.17
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-20.21-generic 4.15.17
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-20-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7
Architecture: amd64
CrashDB: ubuntu
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Wed May 2 21:03:32 2018
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
Symptom: ubuntu-release-upgrader
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2018-05-02 (0 days ago)
VarLogDistupgradeTermlog:

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

For reference the package sbackup was also removed from Debian.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=870969

It was also removed from Ubuntu because it uses gksu which was deprecated.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sbackup/+bug/1740618

I do agree that adding it to the release notes would be a good idea though.

[Anton (feenstra)]

As a forward pointer to people who urgently need to recover data from their existing sbackup backups, fortunately, the sbackup backend simply uses tar, so with a few steps you can still do that. (You can do it gui-wise, but it will be faster with some basic commandline stuff.)
No time now to give a detailed how-to, but these are the steps:
1) locate your backup directory
2) find the latest/newest dir that ends in '.ful' (this was a full snapshot). Untar the files.tgz archive that is in there (refer to tar manpage for how to do partial extract).
3) go through all of the newer '.inc' directories (these are your incremental updates), and untar all of them on top of the previously extracted files.

You will need some extra work for files that were deleted after the latest '.ful'.
I'll see if I can still install from source, will report later if succesffull.
P.s., I've tried deja-dup (duplicity), but that is dreadfully slow. Sbackup does 88G in 20 minutes or so (using pigz for parallel compression), deja-dup took more than 4 hours! Not an option for me. Also, config options are severely limited (like include/exclude on file pattern, smart cleanup options).

[Anton (feenstra)]

it's the front-end gui that doesn't work anymore, due to gksu and gnome2 support (probably some other stuff as well). The base deb package (backend) still works if downloaded from e.g. https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/artful/amd64/sbackup/0.11.6-0ubuntu1
IIRC there also was a commandline restore option/script, but didn't yet see it.

[Simon Lambourn (simon-lambourn-o)]

Thankyou Anton for your helpful comments.
This may not be the place to discuss this, but has anyone tried Areca backup (http://www.areca-backup.org/)? It seems to have most of the same function in terms of include/exclude, incremental backup etc.