<div dir="auto">(Possibly) success!!!! I tried a couple older passwords that I used to use on everything before I learned that you shouldn't use the same passwords on everything. One of them worked! I am still using the old spare laptop and putting the restored files on the same 4TB backup drive with the encrypted backup files. At the rate this is going, it will take a few hours to finish. Then hopefully I will have unencrypted files that I can just copy to my main laptop.<div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Here's what's weird. I had a text file with all my passwords. The password I had listed for Deja Dup was NOT the password that worked. I am thinking that maybe (I could be misremembering some details) what happened was:</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">- I did a full backup of the home directory before I upgraded from Ubuntu Studio 18.04 to 20.04.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">- The upgrade installer gave the option of not erasing the home directory, so I never needed to restore it from the backup drive.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">- But I had to reinstall the Deja Dup application, so it lost my password and asked me to create a new one the next time I used it, which I did, and added to my password text file.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">- Then, in anticipation of reinstalling Ubuntu Studio 20.04 (which I did to try to fix my audio issues,) I did an incremental backup.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">- Result: Now the latest incremental backup has a different password from the previous backups.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Let me know if you guys think this is a plausible explanation. If I am correct, I'm guessing that what will be restored is everything except what was backed up since upgrading from 18.04 to 20.04. A much smaller bummer than losing everything since December of 2016!!</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Jim</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:19 PM Jim Ransone <<a href="mailto:jim.ransone@gmail.com">jim.ransone@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:sans-serif">Much thanks to everyone for the suggestions and advice so far! Here is an update:</span><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif"><br></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif">I have attempted to duplicate the entire scenario on an older spare laptop.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif"><br></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif">- I installed the same OS - Ubuntu Studio 20.04. </div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif">- I created a folder and filled it with a handful of files.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif">- I used Deja Dup to back up the folder onto a usb flash drive. (Didn't want to risk doing something weird to my actual backup drive.) Was asked to create a password.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif">- Reinstalled Ubuntu Studio 20.04 with the same settings as before (erasing everything.)</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif">- Reinstalled Deja Dup.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif">- Used Deja Dup with the password to successfully restore the backup.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif"><br></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif">This indicates to me that you are right, Bob. The password was the password. There is no other key that's being created and stored somewhere. It also would seem to indicate that the password is somewhere on the backup drive, but I don't have any idea where on the drive that would be.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif"><br></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif">So either I am misremembering the original password, as you suggested, Bob, or there is some other issue. I have seen comments online about a bug that cause it to sometimes fail to store the key.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif"><br></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif">Jim</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif"><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 3:51 PM DJ-Pfulio via Ale <<a href="mailto:ale@ale.org" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">ale@ale.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">If you have backups, but have never attempted to restore them onto a new system, you don't actually have any backups. You have "hope and prayers." We know how well that works.<br>
<br>
IT pros get called into clients all the time where they've been doing backups for years, but never tested them. Turns out all that time and effort was useless because of some small issue. Corruption, constant failures the last 5 yrs, missing encryption key, so key part of the data not included in the stored backups. There's always something. Always.<br>
<br>
If you've never tested the restore for your backups, in a clean-room environment, then it is highly, likely that they won't work.<br>
<br>
Of course, if you have the money and time to clone 50 HDDs to have 50 backup versions, fantastic. 1 copy is great, but what happens if a file gets malware and nobody notices for 60 days? 120 days - 180 days of versioned backups are pretty easy and really don't take much storage.<br>
<br>
Cloning is the brute force backup method. Extremely wasteful and unnecessary for Unix systems. I'd love to know how to have 180 days of cloned storage for high risk systems. Whereas versioned backups for the email gateway here are:<br>
Time Size Cumulative size<br>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
Sun Aug 23 01:30:02 2020 63.1 MB 63.1 MB (current mirror)<br>
Sat Aug 22 01:30:02 2020 1.86 KB 63.1 MB<br>
Fri Aug 21 01:30:02 2020 496 bytes 63.1 MB<br>
Thu Aug 20 01:30:02 2020 895 bytes 63.1 MB<br>
...<br>
Wed Apr 29 01:30:02 2020 788 bytes 63.4 MB<br>
Tue Apr 28 16:27:34 2020 744 bytes 63.4 MB<br>
Mon Apr 27 01:30:02 2020 11.6 KB 63.4 MB<br>
Sun Apr 26 01:30:02 2020 866 bytes 63.4 MB<br>
<br>
That system uses:<br>
$ df -hT<br>
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on<br>
/dev/vda1 ext4 8.8G 4.3G 4.1G 52% /<br>
<br>
Why backup 4G when 64MB will do? Just sayin'.<br>
<br>
On 8/24/20 2:45 PM, Jim Ransone via Ale wrote:<br>
> David, thanks for the advice!<br>
> <br>
> Bob, does "single key" mean that my password is the key itself?<br>
> <br>
> <br>
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 2:23 PM Bob via Ale <<a href="mailto:ale@ale.org" rel="noreferrer noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">ale@ale.org</a> <mailto:<a href="mailto:ale@ale.org" rel="noreferrer noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">ale@ale.org</a>>> wrote:<br>
> <br>
> <br>
> From ddging it looks like Deja Dup uses a single key (symmetric cipher).<br>
> <br>
> The OP wrote: "I tried the password and it acted busy for a little<br>
> while and then asked for the password again. Not sure what that means."<br>
> <br>
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