Deja Dup: "Restore Single File" fails with "cannot create directory" error message

While using Deja Dup to do a "Restore Single File" operation from within Nautilus into /etc/cups/ppd, which is owned by root, I encountered an error.  Deja Dup finds the file and tries to do the restore operation, but fails due to "cannot create directory" error.

Deja Dup needs to create a temporary directory into which the restored file is temporarily placed. If Deja Dup doesn't have write permission in this directory the restore operation will therefore fail with the "cannot create directory" message.

I probably could have run Deja Dup as root but maybe that's not such a good idea for one thing, and also I would have had to reenter the info regarding the access key etc. This info is already in Deja Dup if it runs in normal user mode.

There also doesn't seem to be a way when running in this mode to have Deja Dup place the restored file in some other directory  (/tmp/ or /home/me/tmp) other than the canonical one (i.e. the original location).

It was sort of a hack but I temporarily changed the permissions of the target directory long enough to restore the file (i.e. long enough to create the temp directory, download the restored file to the temp directory,  move the file back to the parent directory, and finally delete the temp directory).

Once that was complete I simply changed the directory permissions back to what they originally were.

In retrospect the workaround is fairly obvious and it does point out that the UI for Deja Dup is lacking in the sense that a full restore may be redirected to a directory of the user's choice, but a single file restore seems to lack this capability.

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