Help: Restoring from ?auto? backups.

[theo1ja...@gmail.com]

I need help to help myself.

The story thus far:
I was in the middle of a >qubes-dom0-update when my computer lost power. (Or, rather, got tired of me forgetting to plug it in.) I plug it back in and press the power button while knocking on wood with crossed fingers. Get through disk encryption (that was almost certainly going to be fine). Black screen with blinking cursor for ~60sec. Something about kernals and bad things happening pops up (can't start kernal or something). Try to read through and understand what is happening then all of a sudden I'm on the DM's (lightDM?) login screen. I type in my password and I get similar screen as before the DM, then dumped to login. Try a few more times: same story.

Shortcut to tty2; login from there. Flail about for a bit, then I think, "Just maybe Marek and Johanna made it auto backup. (And every one else. Hey, I know it's a community effort.)" Find out the name format of the backup files and rack my brain for all that I know about bash. Figure out how I can search with list and grep. Find the files and try to restore.

Errors... Errors everywhere.

Look for other instances of people in my woeful plight. Find this: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/qubes-users/BqfCKvWJrBE/discussion topic. Try the fix. That's a nope. Look elsewhere for file. Still nope.

That's where I got to.

If you would like more info or, simply, prefer to read the above story in painstakingly transcribed (on a phone no less) bash, see below:


[user@dom0 ~]$ sudo find / | grep 'qubes-2017*’ | uniq
/var/lib/qubes/backup/qubes-2017-11-02-18:20:01.xml
/var/lib/qubes/backup/qubes-2017-11-01-19:40:10.xml

[user@dom0 ~]$ qvm-backup-restore --debug /var/llb/qubes/backup/qubes-2017-11-02-18\:28\:01.xml
Please enter the passphrase to verify and (if encrypted) decrypt the backup:
Checking backup content...
Working in temporary dir:/var/tmp/restore_RiqPRi
Extracting data: 1.0 MiB to restore
Run command[u'tar', u'-ixvf", 'var/lib/qubes/backup/qubes-2017-11-02-18:28:01.xml', u'-C’, ##cont next line##
u'/var/tmp/restore_RiqPRi, u'backup-header’, u’backup-header.hmac’, u’qubes.xml.000’, u’qubes.xml.000.hmac’]
Got backup header and hmac: ,
ERROR: Premature end of archive while receiving backup header. Process output:
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: backup-header: Not found in archive
tar: backup-header.hmac: Not found in archive
tar: qubes.xml.000: Not found In archive
tar: qubes.xml.000.hmac: Not found in archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors


[user@dom0 ~]$ ls -a /etc/qubes-rpc/
. policy qubes.InputKeyboard qubes.NotifyTools qubes.ReceiveUpdates qubes.WindowlconUpdater
.. qubes.GetRandomizedTime qubes.InputMouse qubes.NotifyUpdates qubes.SyncAppMenus

[user@dom0 ~]$ sudo find / | grep "qubes.Restore' || echo "Couldn't find anything…”
Couldn't find anything...


I've been a Linux user for about 2 months and I made the jump to Qubes earlier this week. And I had barely grazed command line interfaces before that so I'm quite proud that I've made it this far without any walkthroughs but I need some real deal help now.

Could I just reinstall? Probably. But I want to learn and that isn't going to teach me anything.

Pls.
Pls.
Pls.
Pls.
Pls hlp.
I would be ever so grateful.


Steps to reproduce:
Screwup as hard as me.