Deja-dup is a backup tool, implemented as a frontend to duplicity. I am using it to backup to a remote server with ssh.
Lately it often just said “Backup Failed” and “Permission denied”. This message is not very helpful because the backup location is in fact reachable and permissions are fine.
The problem is somewhere else. And here comes the gvfsd into play. deja-dup actually uses gvfsd to mount the filesystem locally. However, gvfsd is started with dbus, and for some reason this did not work for me.
So my solution is to start a fresh dbus environment and run deja-dup from there:
$ dbus-run-session – deja-dup –backup
Works like a charm.