Comment 6 for bug 1570304

I just encountered this error, so it is still a problem. I am running Linux 4.4.0-140-generic i686, Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS. I have a tar backup of my os, 6 incrementals, and was trying to restore to another partition. The error message I received is:

tar: Cannot rename ‘mnt/var/lib/app-info/icons/ubuntu-xenial-backports-multiverse/64x64’ to ‘mnt/var/lib/app-info/icons/ubuntu-xenial-security-multiverse’: Directory not empty

I ran tar a second time and got the same error message.

For me, the only solution seems to be to build a new tar without any incrementals, and extract from that, rather than use what I already had. I am lucky that I can do that in my case, but not a solution which is always possible or practical.