Restoring a single folder appears to restore entire backup instead

[Jason Heeris]

Distribution: Ubuntu 11.10
deja-dup 20.1-0ubuntu0.2
duplicity 0.6.15-0ubuntu2

Steps:

1. Open Deja-Dup
2. Select "Overview" pane, click "Restore..."
3. Select backup location, click "Forward"
4. After backup check completes, select a date and click "Forward"
5. Select "Restore to specific folder" and select a folder (in my case, "$HOME/.thunderbird/[MY PROFILE]/Mail/Local Folders"), click "Forward"

At this point, Deja Dup showed a progress screen. The "Details" pane showed ALL of the files under my home dir being restored, not just the folder I selected! At this point I cancelled pretty quickly.

I checked the modification times on the files I *think* I remember seeing on the progress screen, and they still have today's date. I might have got the files wrong, or maybe Deja Dup only *says* that it's restoring them.

Either way, it's a bug. Deja Dup is either restoring files it shouldn't, or erroneously reporting the details of its operation.

[Jason Heeris (detly)]

Note that the activity log is NOT from the actual session I describe. It's a log from following the steps through to the final restore step, but clicking cancel instead of restore (I don't want to risk wiping all my data).

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Ah... Interesting. So the path you went down is for restoring your whole backup. The "Restore to specific folder" is when you don't want to put the files in their original locations, but instead restore the whole backup into a new folder.

To restore just one directory, follow these steps: http://live.gnome.org/DejaDup/Help/Restore/Revert

Does that work for you?

[Jason Heeris (detly)]

Oh right! The behaviour makes sense now.

Yes, your suggestion works — I found it described somewhere else and used it right after this approach failed.

So this isn't so much a bug, but a data point suggesting ambiguous wording...? Now that I read it again, I have to admit I don't know how else I'd phrase that action, but at the time it seemed like the obvious way to do what I wanted.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether I'm a standard case in usability, or an outlier :P

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Déjà Dup because there has been no activity for 60 days.]