Testing Oneiric alpha on an upgrade from Natty and am trying to configure Deja-Dup. It /appears/ to be working, but I have zero confidence that it has ever successfully performed a backup because the interface seems very buggy.
In the screenshot backupInTaskbarAfterAutostart.png I am showing that Deja-dup has automatically started running shortly after turning on my laptop. The icon appears, but when I click the icon to bring focus to the desktop the application seems to silently crash because the icon simply disappears.
But what I view as a larger problem is that when I then manually launch Deja-Dup it reports that a "Most recent backup" was performed 7 days ago and the "Next automatic backup" is scheduled for "Today". The problem is that I have no confidence that the 7-day old backup was actually completed successfully because I recall it stopping short again because I attempted to interact with the program after it had auto-started, just like I described above. From a user-perspective I am not aware of a method to look and assure myself that any full backup was EVER completed "Successfully", which is extremely important to me since I plan to do a fresh reinstall of Oneiric once I know I have all my info protected. I can't seem to locate a logfile either, but in my opinion a user shouldn't have to go digging around in /var/log to determine if the backup solution is healthy or not.
This may fall under a separate bug report but the button Backup Now is grayed out and does not allow me to initiate a backup (see screenshot buttonsGrayedOut.png). Maybe that's because the scheduled backup is actually already running? A casual user has no way to know.
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: deja-dup 19.91-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-11.18-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-11-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: wl nvidia
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Sep 15 06:51:53 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Alpha amd64+mac (20110312)
SourcePackage: deja-dup
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-09-03 (12 days ago)
This is all because of bug 732997. Unity/compiz does not gracefully handle windows that start iconified. That's what's causing the program to appear to close when you click on the icon (even though it's really continuing in the background). I've been holding off on working around this in Deja Dup, but for Beta 2 of 11.10, I think I will have to.
Note that you should have gotten a little notification bubble at the end of your successful backup 7 days ago that said "Backup complete" or something similar. Easy to miss though.
For your use case of just wanting to have your data safe before reinstalling, I'd just recommend copying files directly to your external drive. Backup programs are best when used over the long term, to allow you to get back older files and to prevent against unplanned data loss.