Comment 24 for bug 681002

I thought I added my experiences with this bug. This might especially help people who were redirected here by duplicates of this bug.

One day, when I was trying to backup files on a USB HDD, deja-dup would keep asking for a password and not do anything. The day before, it still worked (on Arch Linux with deja-dup 22.1 and gnupg 2.0.19). The debug output was similar, yet different to the one in the bug description. Essentially, the GPG output was:

gpg decrypt_message failed: unknown system error

It turned out that the backup files created the day before were corrupted, i.e. 0 bytes. This was most likely due to turning off the USB disk before its cache was flushed. Deleting the 0-byte files made deja-dup continue to work again as expected.