Connection failed, please check your password: Login dialog cancelled

[Stephen Rees-Carter]

I am trying to restore my home folder using Deja-Dup after I formatted my whole drive by mistake yesterday.
I have used Deja-Dup to keep it backed up for a number of weeks, so I thought I was all good, but when I go to restore my folder I get the following message:

"Connection failed, please check your password: Login dialog cancelled."

The steps I go through to replicate this error:

1) backup whole /home/valorin/ folder daily via Deja-Dup
2) stupidly format harddrive
3) install fresh copy of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS i386
4) sudo apt-get install deja-dup
5) Load up deja-dup, go to "Edit" > "Preferences" > and specify my details for my backup folder
6) Click "Restore" on the main window
7) Tick the "encrypted" option and go Forward
8) Type in my password, go forward
9) Select the date to restore from, go forward
10) Select "Restore files to original locations", go forward
11) Click Restore and wait...

Then this friendly error comes up:
"Connection failed, please check your password: Login dialog cancelled."

I discovered that if I specify restoring to a different folder (i.e. /home/valorin/restore/) it appears to work fine - I haven't it to complete the restore job yet, but it actually started to restore files unlike the 'restore to original locations' job.

I will go ahead and restore my files via the different folder method for now, but it would be good to not have this extra step as I will need to manually copy everything across to my home folder...

If I can do anything else to help test this bug, let me know :) Even if it involves formatting my machine again and testing a full restore.

Requested debugging information:

valorin@zoot:~$ dpkg-query -W deja-dup duplicity
deja-dup 14.1-0ubuntu0.1
duplicity 0.6.08b-0ubuntu2
valorin@zoot:~$ lsb_release -d
Description: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

I have a guess as to why this is happening. I recently fixed a bug in trunk that sounds like it might be this. If you're super adventurous, try out trunk (which would mean using bzr and compiling it). Otherwise, I will have a nice testing package for you soon.

[Stephen Rees-Carter (valorin)]

I might wait for the testing package, I'm not that good at compiling code as yet...

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Can you do me a favor and try the package update in https://launchpad.net/~deja-dup-team/+archive/stable-testing ? See if that fixes it for you.

[Stephen Rees-Carter (valorin)]

Thanks :)

I just updated to that version, but it appears to have the same problem.
I simply just added the repo, and did an "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade".

Any other suggestions?

[cement_head (andorjkiss)]

Has this bug been solved?

[Stephen Rees-Carter (valorin)]

I will have to do a fresh install to test this bug, which will take a bit of effort to setup. Do you still want me to test this bug, or can we assume it has been fixed? If I encounter it again, I will let you know.

It was easy enough to get around it, so it isn't a show stopper.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Eric Kerby (erickerby)]

I have encountered this same problem when trying to test restoring from my Deja Dup backup. I have Deja Dup configured to perform daily backups of a particular directory (around 650GB) on my system over SSH to another computer's hard drive. When restoring a "missing file" from the file browser, I see the error mentioned in this bug's description. I tested restoring the complete backup to another directory, and this appeared to work. That isn't a very good workaround for me to get at a single file, though, since the backup size is very large.

Here is an older Ubuntu forums thread that linked to this bug:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1480211

I am currently running:
deja-dup 20.1-0ubuntu0.2
duplicity 0.6.15-0ubuntu2
Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

I figured out why this is happening. Sometimes Deja Dup will prompt for your root password, if it thinks it might need it to restore the files (i.e. you are restoring files outside your home directory). When that happens, root doesn't have the ssh server mounted like your user does. And this confusing error is the result.

The solution, I believe, is to pass the ssh username/password in duplicity's environment, so it can mount it itself, as root.