I have been pleased with urbackup for many years now. It has even saved my bacon more than a few times - on physical and virtual machines.
I recently had upgraded my laptop to a modestly higher tech capabilities - WiFi card is higher end, Main disk is NVME, and huge use of a NAS storage server where I run urbackup server from a docker image. All has worked quite well for some time. BUTTTTTT – this time, my laptop crashed; I had weekly FULL Image backups going back for 30 days, then monthly FULL Image for 90 days. I felt good! Go to use the urbackup restore CD/USB Stick and WiFi does not work. Ok, fine, I use my USBC Ethernet adapter (Standard RTX 8153 chipset) – NOPE! And this did work in the previous version of the restore iso (as well as my wifi, but I almost always use Ethernet connection. Now I’m really stuck – Backups galore and no way to use them.
Fine, I’ll combine them, decompress them into a VHD file and mount in a virtual machine (previous success on many machines). Go to use urbackupsrv assemble – Segmentation faults and no success. I mounted a fresh install on a windows VM, used the assemble_disk_image.bat – multiple errors all related to GPT (almost unceremoniously the standard on new Windows machines these days). I tried every backup I had for the laptop (7-8) and no success.
Long story – it appears that technology is outpacing the development team’s abilities to keep the infrastructure updated. The last version of the restore iso is dated April 03, 2022 - 30 months ago. Backups only work when we have the ability to restore.
BIG Request – not to hammer the devs - they are certainly doing a great job. But, every element of restoring the backup should be able to be accomplished from the command line in linux. Even if it is painstakingly slow and error prone due to human error. But at least if that were available, the last resort of hunkering down and doing the work from the command line might be available.
Sorry if this comes off annoying, but it’s been a very frustrating 5 days. (I even went so far as to compile a new kernel to see if that would help – colossal effort going down a rabbit hole I’ve rarely been down.)
I still have my backups. If I can get them combined into a VHD I could at least get a VM spun up to get a factory reset of the physical laptop back to my “working environment” manually.