Wrong message when file system is full (restore)

[Huygens]

I was attempting to restore a backup made previously on Amazon S3, just to verify that the workflow backup then restore is reliable.
I did not check before if my hard disk could accommodate the space for the backup, which it could not. But here is the error message I got, which is clearly not helpful and should be updated:
  Restore destination directory /tmp/deja-dup-5BgadS already exists.
  Will not overwrite.

That said, I have 2 other remarks about this process, but I will create 2 separate bug reports, so that they can be handled and updated separately.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Hmm, that is a bad error message! Thanks for the catch. The message should definitely be improved.

Thank you for your series of bugs about restoring. It seems Déjà Dup wasn't quite 100% reliable for you, which must not be very reassuring. :-/ The worst time for a backup solution to fail is when you are trying to restore from it.

[Huygens (huygens-25)]

That was fine :-) I was just testing the software to see its limit. So it was not a real case recovery. Now that I know the limits, I can plan reliably my backups as I know the "known issues" and how to avoid them. While waiting for the improvements ;-)

Do not count really on me for coding, but anyway next week-end I might have some time to have a look at the code, and if I can be of any help I will try.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

That would be great. :) If you are interested, contact the ~deja-dup-hackers team mailing list or grab me on Freenode (user mterry).

[Pete Goodall (pgoodall)]

I'm not sure if this is the same bug or not. I'm trying to restore just one directory from my backup to test if restore will work. I am currently running the Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 5 live CD and am logged in with the default user account (ubuntu). I installed deja-dup and ran `deja-dup --restore /home/pgoodall/bin/` from the command line. After about five minutes of eating up my cpu I receive an error that the directory already exists. There is no /home/pgoodall/bin/ directory or /home/ubuntu/bin/ directory. Also, it cannot be a space issue because according to `df -h` I have plenty of space. I deliberately chose ~/bin/ because it doesn't have much in it at all. I also tried ~/Source and ~/Documents, but I'm pretty sure the ~/Documents _is_ too big to restore in a live CD environment.

Here is what I got from the command line:

$ deja-dup --restore /home/pgoodall/bin/
** (deja-dup:10737): DEBUG: DuplicityInstance.vala:115: Running the following duplicity (10744) command: ionice -c3 duplicity collection-status file:///media/Backup/DejaDup --verbosity=9 --volsize=5 --log-fd=20

** (deja-dup:10737): DEBUG: DuplicityInstance.vala:426: duplicity (10744) exited with value 0

** (deja-dup:10737): DEBUG: DuplicityInstance.vala:115: Running the following duplicity (11122) command: ionice -c3 duplicity restore --restore-time=2009-03-02T10:32:52Z --file-to-restore=home/pgoodall/bin file:///media/Backup/DejaDup /tmp/deja-dup-OiHMQP/home/pgoodall/bin --verbosity=9 --volsize=5 --log-fd=19

** (deja-dup:10737): DEBUG: DuplicityInstance.vala:162: duplicity (11122) process killed

There seems to be plenty of room, so what is the problem?

$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 1007M 2.0M 1005M 1% /lib/modules/2.6.28-8-generic/volatile
tmpfs 1007M 2.0M 1005M 1% /lib/modules/2.6.28-8-generic/volatile
tmpfs 1007M 0 1007M 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 1007M 104K 1006M 1% /var/run
varlock 1007M 0 1007M 0% /var/lock
udev 1007M 128K 1006M 1% /dev
tmpfs 1007M 92K 1006M 1% /dev/shm
rootfs 1007M 576M 431M 58% /
/dev/sr0 697M 697M 0 100% /cdrom
/dev/loop0 673M 673M 0 100% /rofs
tmpfs 1007M 12K 1007M 1% /tmp
/dev/sdb1 230G 115G 103G 53% /media/Backup

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Hi, Pete!

There could be two problems. Either Deja Dup is screwing up putting the file in /tmp/deja-dup-*/home/pgoodall or duplicity is doing something odd (like running out of space).

So to help debug which and what's going on...

(A) Does the /tmp directory that Deja Dup mentions in its console output exist (any part of it)?

(B) Does the target directory (/home/pgoodall) exist and is it writable? I could imagine that the LiveCD hasn't created that and you're running as an unpriviledged user.

(B) If the above doesn't shed any light, can you post the last ~200 lines of doing: 'DEJA_DUP_DEBUG=1 deja-dup --restore /home/pgoodall/bin/ > /tmp/deja-dup.log'?

[Pete Goodall (pgoodall)]

Ok. Two comments:

1) When I created a user account with the same login in the live CD environment, then logged in as that user I was able to restore a reasonably sized (<1GB) directory.

2) IMO, a fundamental flaw in your logic is to restore all files to /tmp/deja-dup-${random}/. In my case I have separate '/' and '/home' partitions. As my root partition is 10 GB and my home directory is >200 GB there is no way you can cache all my files (actually only totaling ~40 GB) in /tmp.

In the second case Deja Dup aborts the restore (after quite a while of untaring as many files as it can into /tmp) with the following error:

"Restore destination directory /tmp/deja-dup-NjzY3e already exists.
Will not overwrite."

The error does not at all reflect the actuality of the problem.

I think this is a separate bug, so I will file it as such, and put the bug number in the comments here.

[Pete Goodall (pgoodall)]

Filed the second use case at Bug #337225