"Backup now!" is grey but no reason is shown in GUI

[typo]

I'm using Ubuntu 11.10 and GNOME Shell. I've started a normal backup and clicked on "X" to close/minimize the window. The backup continued in the background, but no sign on my desktop really displayed this fact. I noticed that the "Backup now!" and "Restore" button was now grey, but there was no information why. After some time I got the message from the GNOME Shell that the backup was a success.

$ dpkg-query -W deja-dup duplicity
deja-dup 20.1-0ubuntu0.2
duplicity 0.6.15-0ubuntu2

[Niccolò Maggioni (nmaggioni-deactivatedaccount)]

+1 for this issue. Not having a reliable way to check a background backup's progress in Gnome is a huge bummer!

It seems that a permanent notification should appear (https://bugs.launchpad.net/deja-dup/+bug/668160), but as per Deja-dup 34.2 and Gnome 3.20.1 I see nothing.

Users can only wait passively until a completion notification arrives, and not being able to know the backup operation's state can lead to inadvertently shut down the machine - invalidating the whole backup.

[simon place (psiplace)]

same here ubuntu mate 15.10

tried to rerun a failed backup, but can't!!!

even changing whats being backup up, no good, last failed backup prevents new ones until next scheduled.

[Vej (vej)]

Fixing this might involve at least the following tasks:

- Find all reasons for invalidated Buttons and a way to provide this reasons to the ui.
- Add something to the ui, which provides the reason to the user using translatable strings.

Regarding the later part: One could add a label on the top of the pane, edit the current descriptions of the buttons (like we do when the gvfs-backend is not available) [1], or provide the information as a tooltip [2].

@typo and everyone affected: Do you have any preferences regarding these solutions?

[1] See the code for this inside of http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~deja-dup-hackers/deja-dup/34/view/head:/deja-dup/widgets/ConfigLabelDescription.vala

[2] See https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/unstable/GtkWidget.html#gtk-widget-set-tooltip-text

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

I think long-term, I might like to move the progress dialog into the main preferences dialog. Just replace the overview page with the contents of the progress dialog for example. But maybe nicer than just that.

[Jan Vlug (jan-vlug)]

Sometimes, when deja-dup is doing a backup, no progress window is visible. But the "Back Up Now..." button is disabled.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

I believe the following patch in master should fix this, by raising the progress window (if it exists) when opening deja-dup and also trying to kill any duplicity child process when deja-dup is closed unexpectedly. Together, this should hopefully preventing this situation.

https://git.launchpad.net/deja-dup/commit/?id=4f705fec674b374d1dbf6669b935883515387fa6