[Bug 1768648] Re: Bionic obsoletes sbackup, makes restore impossible

[Anton]

As a forward pointer to people who urgently need to recover data from their existing sbackup backups, fortunately, the sbackup backend simply uses tar, so with a few steps you can still do that. (You can do it gui-wise, but it will be faster with some basic commandline stuff.) 
No time now to give a detailed how-to, but these are the steps:
1) locate your backup directory
2) find the latest/newest dir that ends in '.ful' (this was a full snapshot). Untar the files.tgz archive that is in there (refer to tar manpage for how to do partial extract).
3) go through all of the newer '.inc' directories (these are your incremental updates), and untar all of them on top of the previously extracted files.

You will need some extra work for files that were deleted after the latest '.ful'.
I'll see if I can still install from source, will report later if succesffull.
P.s., I've tried deja-dup (duplicity), but that is dreadfully slow. Sbackup does 88G in 20 minutes or so (using pigz for parallel compression), deja-dup took more than 4 hours! Not an option for me. Also, config options are severely limited (like include/exclude on file pattern, smart cleanup options).

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1768648

Title:
  Bionic obsoletes sbackup, makes restore impossible

Status in Release Notes for Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in ubuntu-release-upgrader package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  With no warning in the release notes (as far as I could see), upgrading to Bionic has removed and prevented re-installation of Simple Backup, sbackup.   
  A message "Removed, Core functionality" or something similar, was presented in the "remove packages" detail screen.

  However this seems to prevent restoration of any backups created by
  Simple Backup.   So not only do users have to configure a different
  backup solution, they have also lost access to all their backup
  history.

  Was this considered, and if so is there some guidance available to
  affected users?   If not, there probably should be, at least to
  recover or migrate the backups.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
  Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:18.04.17
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-20.21-generic 4.15.17
  Uname: Linux 4.15.0-20-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7
  Architecture: amd64
  CrashDB: ubuntu
  CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
  Date: Wed May  2 21:03:32 2018
  PackageArchitecture: all
  SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
  Symptom: ubuntu-release-upgrader
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2018-05-02 (0 days ago)
  VarLogDistupgradeTermlog:

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