Error by restoring my back-up

Since Debian is no longer supported, I reinstalled Pi-Hole with another Linux distribution. I had made a backup beforehand. When I try to restore the backup, I get an error message:

The file you are trying to upload is not a .tar.gz file (filename: pi-hole-Pi-Hole-teleporter_2025-02-01_14-16-19.tar.gz, type: application/x-tar). Please try again.

When I made the backup, it was saved as a tar file. I renamed the file to tar.gz. It still doesn't work. Does anyone have a solution for this?

Not sure what you mean by this. Debian is clearly still supported. Are you refering to debians arm builds or raspian? What was it that you actually installed and and on what hardware?

.tar is an archive and .tar.gz is a compressed archive. You cannot just rename a file to .gz, it will not be recognized. The backup you are refering to is the teleporter backup?

Hmmm. I wanted to install an update but got an error. When I googled I came across a site where I read that Debian is no longer supported. I am using a Raspberry Pi V3.

Yes that is correct. You go to Settings --> Teleporter and you can select your back-up file. It was downloaded as a tar file when I made the backup. Only Pi-Hole does not recognize the file. I can not select the file. I have to change it to tar.gz but as you say that will not work

You can try to use gzip to compress the file but its unclear if that will work or not. I've tried several backups and it always backs up to a .taz.gz file so I'm not sure why yours would not have.

Could MacOS be the problem? I am using MacOS and the web browser I am using is Safari

Where did you read this?

Debian 11 (Bullseye) and 12 (Bookworm) are supported, including Raspberry Pi OS (also known as "raspbian").

Possibly. See this post that seems to discribe your issue.

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Thank you. I will test it on my Windows laptop tomorrow and will let you know

This was exactly the problem I hed: Pihole refuses to update or install with unsupported OS message if connected on the internet only through ipv6 · Issue #5794 · pi-hole/pi-hole · GitHub

But I am not using IPv6. If I use the Pihole -up command the error message was "Unsupported OS detected: Debian 12" I thought, I have to use another Linux OS.

Then you have a supported OS, but Pi-hole failed to retrieve the list of valid Operating Systems, probably caused by a network (or DNS) failure.

It worked. I unpacked the backup file on my Windows laptop. I installed PeaZip. Via PeaZip I was able to pack the files with the archive format GZIP. The file became a tar.gz file. Via the admin page I successfully restored the backup. That only took 7 seconds. I am happy that I have all my settings back.

Via my Windows laptop I made another backup as a test. This is created as tar.gz. The problem arose because I made the backup via MacOS / Safari. Maybe the developer can look into this and solve it in the future version.

Thanx for the help

Glad it worked. The issue isn't pihole and safari as much as safari automatically unzipped the file. You may find a setting in safari to disable that.

The web interface always creates the backup files with .tar.gz extension.

The issue is in the way Safari handles this files.
Safari has an option to automatically open compressed files, when the files are downloaded. This process saves the backup file uncompressed (maybe Apple developers could change Safari and turn off this option by default :smile:).

When you upload this file, the web interface cannot recognize it as a valid file.

More details here:

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