Deja Dup can't connect to Samba shares

At some point in time, my daily backup software: Deja Dup has stopped working.

It gives me an error message of “Connection timeout”.

After some digging around, I found out it can be solved by setting client min protocol = SMB3 in /etc/samba/smb.conf

The Dicovery

I did software upgrade and removal one night. When it came to the scheduled Deja Dup backup time, the client told me “Connection timeout”!

It has been half a year since I started to do good software engineering practise. Now I get paranoid if my backup system no longer works.

It’s time to fix this!

Missing gnome pakages?

I removed a bunch of gnome packages. This could cause some issues since Deja Dup is a GNOME software.

I tried to install eveything that I have removed, no luck.

GVfs issues?

Deja Dup is using GVfs (GNOME Virtual file system), in particular, gvfs-backend. I tried Nautilus which uses the same backend to mount samba shares. No surprise that Nautilus failed with the same error message.

SMB client issues!

According to this website, the generic cause for “SMB Connection timed out” is SMB protocol problems.

So I

• Opened up /etc/samba/smb.conf
• Added client min protocol = SMB3 to [global] section

Boom, Deja Dup now works!