backup/move of ubuntuone folders failed and deleted all cloud data

[psypher]

Binary package hint: ubuntuone-client

My primary hard drive is starting to fail, with a separate partition picking up bad sectors. So I have gotten a new hard drive and started transferring data from the old one over. For a few reasons I did not want to copy my entire home folder over and wanted a fresh install and home folder. Upon consulting the ubuntuone guys on IRC it confirmed that all i should have to do is copy my ~/.local/share/ubuntuone and ~/Ubuntu\ One folder over to my new drive and log in.

At first it was suggested to log in to u1 once and then log out and disconnect and then start copying the data. I ran u1sdtool -d and u1sdtool -q to stop it. But as soon as I started copying the Ubuntu\ One folder the u1 client connected and started syncing the data I was just writing to it's folder. I think this is where things went wrong

I stopped the copying, disconnected u1, again and this time deleted my key in "passwords and keyrings" , as per suggestion on IRC, which will then not allow the client to connect by itself. I then deleted the ubuntuone and Ubuntu\ One folders and started the copy from the original PC again. After the copy completed I logged into the client. At this point the client just stated that it's synchronizing, the logs showed that all my files were being unlinked.

It was then suggested that I stop the client again and run: u1sdtool --rescan-from-scratch="". This didn't make a difference. I then left the PC overnight to do it's rescan. This morning when I checked my files on the cloud server all the data had been deleted and my pc had started re-uploading my 25GB's worth of data. This is a big problem for me, it took a very long time to get that data on the server in the first place and having to re-upload it all and then let that re-download back down again to other machines is not feasible, I don't have the speed of the available bandwidth, it will cost too much.

I would like to know if my cloud storage could be rolled back a few days and then assist me in correctly transferring the data from the old hard drive to the new drive so that it just logs in and sees all data is safe.

This brings me back to a much sorely needed feature of being able to do local LAN syncs like dropbox does. I find myself in this situation a few times were I require that feature. I understand that, sure for someone who has 2GB of data in the cloud re-downloading that is not a problem, but this is a commercial service and will be used for commercial purposes and it should be expected that users will have a lot of data in the cloud and having a lan sync feature will be gold. With that feature, in theory, a newly installed pc would be able to instantly sync all data via lan just by logging into u1 for the 1st time. All my data, contacts notes etc migrated to a new pc via lan sync, lightning fast.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
My U1 account name is psypher246[at]gmail.com

Thanks

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: ubuntuone-client 1.6.2-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue May 3 10:29:40 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110427.1)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_ZA:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_ZA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubuntuone-client
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Michał Karnicki (karni)]

Hello psypher.

I am very sorry you had to face this problem, and apologize for giving you wrong instructions. Just yesterday late evening we were internally instructed about the very same issue:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/FAQ/SettingUpAnExistingAccount
And this is why I feel personally responsible for unintentionally misleading you in my best efforts to be helpful.

We do have an undelete option. For sync purposes, we'll have to consult. (moved to IRC)

[psypher (psypher246)]

Hi, I would like to update that I had to eventually delete everything everywhere and start over. When I copied all my data back into the u1 folder it stated that it's uploading it all again but it seems that it never really physically uploaded the files again. Looks like it saw that the files were already on the server and just linked them back in again. So that saved me 25GB of bandwidth. But I would like to stress that it would be great to have a detailed documentation on how to backup this without a problem like this. The askubuntu page is missing some detail.