Deja Dup and Ubuntu One backup problem

[Colin Law]

On 19 March 2014 22:23, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 12:29 PM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I am using Deja Dup to backup onto Ubuntu One server from Ubuntu
>> 12.04.  This has all been going well until now.  I see from logging
>> into ubuntu one that I have used up all my allocated space and when I
>> run the backup I get a backup failed with status code 502, and if I
>> run deja dup with debug enabled I see that there is an error
>> Backend Exception: Upload will exceed quota.
>>
>> I thought that it was supposed to remove old backups if necessary to
>> make space but it does not seem to be doing this.
>>
>> Google has not provided any help.  Any suggestions anyone?
>>
>> Colin
>>
>
>  I haven't tried Deja Dup in awhile, but I remembered I had seen
> documentation for it. I went to a terminal and typed
>
> $ man deja-dup
>
> It had a small amount of information, plus a note to SEE ALSO duplicity(1).
>
> $ man duplicity
>
> AH there's some more relevant information... including a note saying the
> remove-older-than command will "Delete  all  backup  sets older than the
> given time.  Old backup sets will not be deleted if backup sets newer than
> time  depend on  them."
>
> SO it's possible that your oldest backup sets are logically linked to the
> newer ones. It's also possible there are some "stuck" partial backups in
> your collection. You might be able to use the duplicity commands for getting
> your collection-status, and find that your backups are all incremental or
> maybe some backups failed and you didn't see the failure message.
>
> Of course, all this assumes the duplicity and deja-dup backups are
> compatible with each other, which I do not know.

Thanks for the suggestions Tommy, I am rather hesitant to try things
like that unless I am certain what they will do, as I don't want to
lose the original backup.  Whatever the cause I think it would come
under the category of a bug, as the GUI driven backup is supposed to
be for non-techy users, so I think I will file a bug and see if there
is any response.

I note that the section of code that is generating the error in
/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/duplicity/backends/u1backend.py has
changed completely between the version in 12.04 on the problematic
machine and the version in 13.10 so it may be that the problem has
been fixed, though I could not see anything obvious in the change
logs.  I cannot upgrade as the laptop graphics will not support Unity
3D and it is in use by an ancient relative so I don't want him to have
to move to a different GUI.

Colin