Restoring a Backup from Terminal

Question

So I have a pretty straightforward question, but have been unable to find a straightforward answer.

I recently did an update on Ubuntu 14.04 and I shut down at the end of the night last night. But now this morning when I boot up the log in screen has a funky resolution and it won't let me log in. I enter my password as usual, but it never then goes to my desktop wallpaper. It seemingly just freezes, though the mouse can still be moved.

Anyway, I can't find a fix so I decided to do a restore from my last backup. I've just been doing the auto backups with, I believe it's Deja-dup in Ubuntu, and need to restore as much as possible.

So the question is, can I restore from the command line using deja-dup? I can Ctrl + alt + F1 to the terminal, I just need to know how to restore the backup. Examples of commands would be incredibly helpful.

Solution

Deja-dup is a graphical front end for the program duplicity.

Typing man duplicity into console gives me this, of note:

duplicity [restore] [options] [--file-to-restore <relpath>] [--time time] source_url target_directory

So it looks like you'll want to try

duplicity <url to your backup> <where you want to restore to>

So if you wanted to restore your folder /home/me:

 duplicity sftp://[email protected]/some_dir /home/me

Comments

[Mitch]

See if the video at this link helps you out: linuceum.com/videoPage.php?id=32

[TheDunadan]

I saw that video, but it's useless info since I can't access the GUI. As I initially stated, I'm looking for a terminal solution.

[linuxUser123]

this gave me an restoring directory /home/me already exists. Will not overwrite error. I had to add --force