Hi
When I try to restore single deleted file via web interface from deleted folder, backup client ask me for confirmation (ok) and hangs on 0% till timeout. Operation is only possible when I first create folder path on client machine. When I try to restore full folder operation is successful.
Client 2.5.24 Windows 11
Server 2.5.31 debian 11/bullseye in proxmox container
Pretty sure that is a feature and not a bug.
If you restored ONE file in lets say c:/temp/1/2/3/4/5/tempfile.txt and NONE of the directories existed, you belive Urbackup should create 6 directories?
yes, also it works that way when I restore directories.
if not there should be information that you need to create path or (better) question where you want to restore the file
Let me understand you correctly:
You want that urbackup, when I restore ONE FILE, to create directories I did NOT restore (I restored a FILE)? NO THANK YOU!
If I restore THE DIRECTORY, yes please, but NOT IF i RESTORE A FILE!
Might I suggest you use the feature that DOWNLOADS the single file into a zip file?
So maybe it at least should i form instead of generating error? There is also no easy/visible option to download file instead of restore on disk
Have you checked your logs if there are errors?
Urbackup is run by one dude (I think), you can’t expect it to function like an adobe product on windows with popups and automation on everything.
Are there really no errors in your logs if you try to restore something to a non existing folder?
Please make tests and provide logs in that case so I can see what is being logged.
For the beginning there was no log, just 0% and zombie process, now I have:
|Errors|30.09.23 00:02|Cannot open "C:\(..cut..)" for writing. System nie może odnaleźć określonej ścieżki. (code: 3)|
/ "The system cannot find the specified path. (code: 3)"
| --- | --- | --- |
|Errors|30.09.23 00:02|Error while downloading files during restore|
|Errors|30.09.23 00:30|Restore was inactive for 5min. Timeout. Stopping restore...|
But I thought I’ve made enough analyse when error occurs - when there is no folder above. I don’t know how many people work on it, maybe they/he needs help, but I expect from backup software to be rock-solid, more than system is being backup - and my first attempt to restore test file was failed, not pleasant situation. Also I don’t attack anyone, just report a bug to be addressed somehow (at the beginning, it is enough an information message to be displayed that it may happen or something or better folder check and information why error occur, not hanged process)
I found now, that I can click little left and download file whenever I want, but it is not obvious, especially when you learn/test new software and you want it to be safeguard for all computers in your home network.
It is not a bug.
I would be REALLY MAD if ANY software started to create directories when I try to create a FILE!
If you are that new to the software that you did not realize there is a download button I would point to first read the manual for the server software, you are after all a sysadmin of this pretty complicated software now.
Good luck with your backup sollution!
There is a restore button and I expect it to ask what should be done or whatever but there is a bug - process hangs on 0% instead of information why it won’t be recovered (it should in my opinion, I’ve request recovery so it should create 10K directories if needed and make recovery or ask me to to it manually at least)
Why do you go into defence mode instead of analyse the problem?
Tell me again how it did not report it.
Please just stop.
Hi,
today I ran into the same issue on linux console…
Used “urbackupclientctl restore-start …” and got as output:
Starting restore. Waiting for backup server… done
[> ] 0% 0 bytes/3.4707 KB
After waiting for 5min I was asking myself what is going on. Thanks to this thread I now understand two things:
- Intermediate directories need to exist on restore
- User feedback for improving the user experience is not welcome, which I find strange. How can you improve the user experience if reporting such paper cuts is not welcome?!?
And yes a hanging client is bad user experience and a bug as the client waits for the server, but the server already faced an error which is not propagated correctly to the client which means it is protocol error.
Best regards
Hi,
Just wanted to add a simple comment…
Should you need to restore A SINGLE FILE then you can just navigate the web GUI and download it - similar to what was mentioned above, it would be crazy to expect a single-file-recovery to create all directories in the filepath…
Think that that is also a Windohs and Linux limitation on the OS too, that it cannot “just create” an entire folder tree [without additional commands] from a Command/Terminal prompt…
I’ve had similar issues.
say I backup a folder structure of a bunch of picture files (.jpg files, etc.) , where the folder structure has a folder for each year, and in each year’s folder are folders for each month, and within each folder for each month are folders for each day within that month.
Am I to understand, that if I: back that all up for several years; then I have some event that deletes everything (except the backups, of course); that the urBackup client WILL NOT create all the directory trees by itself upon restore? I.e. I’d have to manually create each-and-every–single-directory bottom to top, before the web interface would allow me to do various file restores to a client?
I must be mistaken, correct? Surely the server would be able to instruct a client to create a tree of directories when doing a restore. yes? Surely, when presented with a totally empty directory to restore to, from a client, the server won’t just go " well, there’s no directory there that looks like the directory structure I have backed up … I wait until the expected directory tree exists before starting a restore." Surely this isn’t the way that it works. Correct?
If you restore from the top level folder then it will create the directory structure of the files underneath. I just tested this with my own backup.
If you allowed a partial restore down the tree to create directories above then that would be inconsistent with the whole backup. If there was a subsequent backup then the rest of the tree would eventually be lost. If you want to do a partial download to a specified directory then download a zip and unzip it to where you want the files. The CLI has more options I think.
Hi,
From my seat, I haven’t had to do too much recovery of big chunks of data - but can say that you can use the web interface, and then recover whatever the top folder is (let’s say that you want to recover the “2023” folder and everything in it) then you can drill down to the folder that contained the 2023 dir and download that…
This will give you a ZIP file that will contain all of the folders and the contents of those…but that isn’t what I understood the situation previously - that was about using the CLI to perform the restore…
Have used the web GUI to get stuff back from a dead client…dumped out the ZIP file of the top folder I wanted, and then I just used 7-Zip to export the ZIP to a recovered folder structure…
No, doing a .zip download from the web interface wouldn’t work for me, as various directories are far larger than the bounds set for .zip download.
That aside, I found that, yes, the directory creation does in fact work.
And as far as OP’s issue, where I was running into something similar, I found it to be the result of a permissions “thing” on the storage that the client had access to.
I first tried to tell the urbackup server to start up as the root user using the config at /etc/default/urbackupsrv and within that file setting this part like so:
... (rest of the config file up here...excluded)
#User the urbackupsrv process runs as
USER="root"
Then restarting the server via the normal process.
However, that still started urbackup server running as the urbackup user. Arrrgh!
Eventually I found that I have to go the hardline route, and explicitly tell the server’s execultable to start and run as the root user like so:
urbackupsrv run -u root
That, finally, resulted in the ability to kick-off restores, from the web UI, that ran as expected and created the expected folders while restoring files successfully. 
I don’t know why urbackupsrv isn’t respecting the config file, in this regard. However, consideration/discussion of this point I’ll leave to a totally different thread. For this thread’s topic, I at least solved it for my particular scenario. I hope that it will help some poor soul that comes across a similar issue. 
1 Like