backup and restore with duplicity

Duplicity backup utility is the old workhorse in all recent Ubuntu versions. I use the GUI called Deja-Dup for quite a while now. But until now I never bothered to check how to restore my files. I did decide to check how to restore file, because backup is only half the job! It turns out, that the GUI does a disservice for duplicity users. Restoring an encrypted backup turned out to not work. I didn't bother to research why, and turned to the CLI. This is a reminder on how to restore the files. duplicity accepts the decryption passphrase using only an environment variables. For new comers to Linux and CLI it might look strange. However, current linux versions do not leak environment variables via PS. So without much further words, here is how to restore a backup from an external drive:

$ export PASSPHRASE=YourVeryS3kr3tBackupK3y
$ duplicity restore  file:///path/to/volume/containing/backups /path/to/restore/location/

Duplicity, is quite easy to use, and I like the fact that my desktop reminds me regularly to backup. When I plug a certain USB hard-drive backup simply starts and goes on without me having to think about it too much. I wish restoring was that easy, but that's not the case. One more extremely bothering issue, is that duplicity is practically about to die with Python2. I hope it's not the case, but it seems duplicity has reached it's end, and no one is really working on it.