I think your ~/.nu directory might not have the correct read and write permissions for nud to use it. How did you perform the copy process? scp (ssh) should actually preserve permissions, but if this went over an USB stick then I am not sure what the FAT16 file system will make out of it.
You can try to see if this is the issue by running chmod g+rwx ~/.nu and starting nud again. However, this is not a good final solution.