My main backup is being done with Windows 10 and duplicati.
On a linux box I needed some files from the Win10 backup set. So I fired up dupliciti that was running on the linux box and tried to grab the files using “Direct restore from backup files” Entered the correct B2 bucket name id key passhrase etc.
Everything appeared to work until actual restore. It wold rebuild database and I can see my file set dates in the “Restore From” section but the actual file list just shows an empty file set. Nothing to select from. Just a single line with 1 yellow folder. (no name)
Is it not possible to to a cross platform restore?
The problem isn’t the platform so much as the file system (for metadata stuff like permissions) and path references (drive letters and forward / backward slashes).
Linux and MacOS should be fine with each other’s backups but they and Windows aren’t.
You should be able to restore Linux/MacOS files to Windows 10 by running the Duplicati restore command line inv the WSL (Windows Linux subsystem).
And of course Duplicati running in a Windows guest VM shouldn’t have any issues, but that’s a lot of effort / overheadv just for a restore.
But there isn’t a good way (that I know of) to go the other way around present.
Technically, it should be codeable to get path separator from the backup instead of the running OS which should solve the empty file list problem and allow for conversion between path types, but something would need to be done to handle metadata differences.
I don’t know if there’s one already there but I’d suggest creating (or adding to) a GitHub ticket requesting such a feature be added.
Understandable about the the userid and permissions. Was just looking for a quick way to grab the files once downloaded I could fix any permissions issues that might happen.
Did notice if I actually had duplicati search for files it would show the tree with the files listed. I just did a search for files with “notes” in them. Showed 3 results all in the same Win10 documents directory. I am not allowed to select any of the files except for the entire root tree. I did this just to see what would happen. I had duplicati extract to my /tmp directory on linux box. It grabbed the entire c:/users/* directory backup set, not just the 3 files that got caught in the search.
The directory is owned by duplicati.duplicati as this is what dupliciati runs as on the linux box. This is what I was expecting.
Looks like search and selection on dupliciati might be able to be tweaked to allow this to work somewhat correctly.
edit:
The file timestamps also came out correctly. In an emergency or if I just need to grab some random file from a different computers backup set I can deal with it.
In a similar (though not cross platform) “no files listed” issue I believe we figured out that “searching” for “.” (no quotes) produced the entire file list, though I don’t recall having any issues with restores after that.
