DejaDup Failure: Questions and Issues

[buzzingrobot]

DejaDup failed on first use here on a 12.04 machine. That raises some questions and comments:

1. DejaDup defaults to backing up /home to Ubuntu One. That seems problematic because many /home directories are going to be larger than the default freebie allocation on Ubuntu One.

2. I configured DejaDup to back up /home to a partition on another drive. That failed, with DejaDup complaining about "Permission denied" as soon as it tried to move a file to the backup drive. That's to be expected because that drive is owned by root. Does this mean I need to run DejaDup as root? If I do, will it automatically run as root on future scheduled backups?

3. I want to backup, i.e., clone, the boot drive to a partition on another drive. I want to be able to restore the boot drive in bootable condition from that backup partition. DejaDup won't let me set /dev/sda as the source drive. Should I assume it is intended only for file backups?

[r-senior]

1. I'd agree.

2. Make a folder on the other drive and chown it to yourself and your default group. For example, if you have the other drive mounted on /mnt/backup:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/backup/buzzingrobot
$ sudo chown buzzingrobot.buzzingrobot /mnt/backup/buzzingrobot

Then set /mnt/backup/buzzingrobot as the target for your backups. I do this and it works well.

Your username might not be buzzingrobot, but you get the idea.

3. For the type of use you suggest, I think you want something like CloneZilla or, if you want to get your hands dirty, dd from the command line. Others may have better suggestions.