I would need some help immediately. I upgraded Chromium with snap which I do not do so regularly. I use Ubuntu with serveral users that have separately encrypted home directories. After a while I started Chromium and for at least one user the application was reset to a state from one year ago. All history and tabs are gone. Even Chrome plugins appeared that were removed a long time ago. Last time when that happened and I tried to disable snap, there was some backup under ~/snap/chromium. But now I cannot find out how to restore Chromium’s current user settings.
What is the way to undo snap’s actions? Is there a better way than to guess which number is the correct directory name under ~/snap/chromium that Chromium currently uses and then move another directory to that path? “mv 1119 1382” did not change anything this time.
Where are my settings being saved? In the numbered directories or under “common/” I cannot find them.
What does snap do when an upgrade has taken place? Does it erase/change the user directory, when a package is being started as the user for the first time after the upgrade?
I never installed snap myself so surprisingly Ubuntu has added experimental unstable software to LTS and I am having a lot of troubles with this at each upgrade.
ok, I did not do a “snap save” before the upgrade. Does snap automatically remove user settings on purpose? For some of my local users snap did not touch the settings. If e.g. snap has trouble accessing encrypted user settings then when does it delete them? I assume there is some snap process creating a new directory for each package in all /home/*/snap/ directories. But what happens to the previous user settings directory? What can I do to not have it erased on any snap upgrade? I mean obviously I do not want my user settings to be erased, I cannot understand snap’s purpose
well, during upgrades configs just get copied forward in ~/snap/<snapname>/<version>/ not sure what happens if the directory is encrypted and the user is not logged in though … i’m moving this post to the snapd caregory so the right people see it in their queue …
Some answers to these questions would help me to get my user data back:
If there was no access to ~/snap, how could snap copy data from there?
If there was access to ~/snap and snap copied configs, where is my original user data?
When I copy ~/snap/<snapname>/<prev_version>/ to ~/snap/<snapname>/<highest_version>, why does that not restore my user data? <prev_version> is the directory with the second latest access time and second highest number.
After snap upgrade, the user settings and browser history are from one year ago. How did snap find these old user settings?
Well if it can’t access your home directory when the upgrade is done, it will just copy what it can see to the new revision directory, which in the case of the encrypted home directory not being mounted would be an empty directory.
What is
snap list chromium --all
ls ~/snap/chromium
for one such user with this encrypted home directory?
Also please note that we don’t yet have good support for encrypted home directories with snaps, for this precise reason that snapd/snap services run outside the purview of a user session, so they may run when the home directory for a user is still encrypted and thus unavailable.
