Help, recover old file versions

Hi,

My last backup was Jan, following a house move. I had 83 backup versions.

The other day I updated Duplicati to Duplicati - 2.0.5.1_beta_2020-01-18

Today I set the right IP to my little backup hard disk (attached to a Raspberry Pi) and backed up

I have now lost all my versions (have one from today). I see what has happened, I had retention set to 3 months.

My question is there any way to recover the versions so I can restore my files from January?

Welcome to the forum!

The only possibility I can think of is undeleting the files on that hard disk. Success would depend on filesystem type and other write activity on the disk. Honestly the chances of recovering all the data without there being any corruption seems quite low.

If you still want to attempt this, the rough outline of steps would be: disable the scheduler in Duplicati so it doesn’t attempt any more backups, disable anything else that writes to that disk, undelete the files, and then run the database recreation command in Duplicati. If that completes without error, you could try restoring the data you need.

Thanks drwtsn32

It’s ntfs, the drive is used a media server and an LMS server. I think I would have a fair amount of success undeleting the files using a file recovery program. I suppose it depends whether duplicati deletes the files before or after a successful backup, I’m guessing after?

Is there something in January backup that you need restored now, or are you trying to make all of your 83 backup versions available in case you want an old version someday? January builds on older ones.

Clearly there’s been a retention accident, but I’m not clear on desired retention, and the current needs

Compacting files at the backend

After each backup operation, old backups are marked for removal.

which is just the start. The manual goes on to explain possible repackaging of now-too-empty remote files into new files, and that’s where I worry about the level of upload activity and new writes to NTFS.

I happened to get a compact this morning, and here’s what it says in the job log about the file activity:

image

The default job log at Show log → Remote can show you what specific files it deleted (or uploaded).
This will let you figure out what to undelete and how much to worry about the level of file overwriting.

I’m not that hopeful either. I’d encourage you to be careful not to make things worse, e.g. if you delete the local datbase without a backup copy, then break the remote so a Recreate fails, you have nothing besides your original files. But if those are still good, you can backup fresh and get back in business…