[3.4.0 onwards?] Restore backup fails when restoring notes (here: from Xperia X to Xperia 10 II )

[sunkan]

After some investigation I saw /home/nemo in one of the paths that was being used during the restore of the Notes.
Adding a temporary symlink during the restore helped me get Notes restored properly.

Add symlink (using developer terminal or via SSH connection)
$ devel-su
# ln -s /home/defaultuser /home/nemo

Run the restore procedure

Then I removed the symlink
$ devel-su
# rm /home/nemo

Maybe this helps someone with the same issue as me.

[incognito]

Had the same issue and resolved it the same way, came here to share the wisdom only to find out that somebody already did.

Anyway, this should be reflected somewhere in migration docs (or better yet, Backup should be user-aware).

[peterleinchen]

Moved to bug reports.
And adapted title a bit (more general as I expect this to be a systematic problem when restoring backups from ‘nemo devices’ to ‘defaultuser devices’ whereas your report is first (erm, second) time I read about it).

[Tobi]

Perfect! This helped! Thank you!

[sviscapi]

Hi all

@sunkan : many thanks for this tip, it helped me restoring the SD card backup file from the Xperia X to my brand new Xperia 10 II

Cheers, Samuel

[sunkan]

Always nice to hear that it has help others

Did not want to file it into bug reports immediately as I did not know if it was due to something I had done to my previous phone. But as others have the same issue it sounds like it is some functionality missing to handle this case.

[kilfinge]

Sfos 4.2, this bug still remains, making non skilled ordinary user unable to do backup of the phone.

[Louis]

This would be easy to fix by replacing every occurrence of /home/nemo with /home/defaultuser in Notes/data/notes.sql
Jolla should do this before initializing a restore.

I extracted the backup, did the replacement with sed -i and recreated the tar which restored without an issue.

[spark]

The backup procedure really needs some love from the developers. A f***ed up backup is really the last thing a software needs.
Things to be adressed:

• Error when creating the backup due to missing space (although the error source is not stated as missing space)
• Error when loading the backup due to the naming of home folder (although not stated as such)
• Overwriting of existing accounts by the backup - opt-out needed.
• Overwriting of existing notes by the backup - opt-out needed.

Anyway, thanks OP, your hint saved me a lot of time!

[mmr]

I restored a XA2 backup to my new 10 III device about just a week ago. After reading this, I’m happy to discover the option not to manually rewrite all my notes again. But I don’t want to have other things (calender, account, etc) overwritten again. So I wonder if it is possible to transfer the notes only with some manual preparation:

• Extract the notes folder from the original XA2 backup and save it to a new container which has only the notes folder in it.
• Create the symlink on the 10 III as described here
• access the modified backup-container using the 10 III’s restore function
• hopefully just the notes will be restored…
• delete symlink

Would that work or is SF only accepting a backup container with a complete structure of all its backup-items? If the latter is true, could the commands mentioned in the restore-log be used to transfer the notes data only?

Thanks in advance…

[Loesje]

I did exactly that. I did not want to restore my accounts, so removed that folder from the backup. Worked like a charm. I suppose it will work with only notes too.

[Electrowolf]

Having the same issue with my Xperia 10. Backup made yesterday, flashed device, unable to restore now as notes fail.

Main issue that I have with the current situation is that the back process is quitting all together instead of just skipping the failed directories. As I don’t have any notes this would result in no issues for me as a user.

Suggested solution works, but would be great if no developer stuff would be needed ;-).