Warn the user before doing a restore of configuration files

[Nick Moffitt]

Following an unrelated crisis on my new laptop (okay I'll admit it: I forgot my drive encryption passphrase), I took steps while it was still fully functional to make a backup of ~ for later restore. Fortunately the tools guided me into a backup of /home ignoring the Trash and my Downloads directory. I wrote it to an SD card that had plenty of space, verified the install, did a test restore to a temporary directory, and then was satisfied enough to flatten the machine.

After my first boot, I launched the backups tool and ran a full restore from this backup, putting the files in their normal locations.

At this point, Unity INSANED. I ended up with a desktop that consisted of nautilus, the default wallpaper, and not much else. I ended up going into a vc with Ctrl+Alt+F1, but couldn't find any obvious culprits. No amount of logging out and in, or of rebooting could save me from this situation.

Either the tools should be more cautious about restoring dangling symlinks, files being watched by dbus et al, and permissions races (Yeah, you'll have trouble writing that file into the directory you faithfully restored as 0555. You have the technology to avoid this problem), or it should warn the user against doing a full restore of /home like that. I ended up restoring to a secondary location and selectively pulling files into place again, in the end.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: duplicity 0.6.23-1ubuntu4.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-29.52-generic 3.13.11.2
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-29-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Thu May 29 23:17:15 2014
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-05-29 (0 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140417)
SourcePackage: duplicity
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)