I am planning to ‘retire’ a few Qubes / VMs, which I used for various topics in the past.
I’d like to be sure, that I can safely restore them in the future (5+ years) !
Is there anything I have to take care of, beside storing a backup of both the App-VM - and - its associated Template-VM ?
Respect the 3-2-1 backup rules
The backup file itself generated by the backup tool is recoverable in the future even without Qubes OS, there is a procedure on the documentation, make sure you don’t lose the password.
In addition, you could create par2 files which allow to repair a file up to n% of corrupted bytes, but it shouldn’t be useful if you follow the 321 rules, however it’s still a cheap and effective extra precaution. See par2cmd program for this.
Do you want the qubes or the data in those qubes?
How much customisation have you done in the templates? In the qubes?
What will you do if the template has reached eol or is no longer supported
in 5+ years? (Extremely likely)
What will you do if the old format is not fully supported in a new Qubes
release?
These are all things to consider.
Besides storing a backup of the qube and template, I would take a full
backup of the data stored in the qubes, and store that as carefully
as you store the Qubes Backup, but at a different site.
I’ve done this a number of times in the past. I have almost always
rebuilt new templates and qubes, and restored the data. This gives me
greater control.
I can do this because I salt my templates and qubes, and keep those
states backed up. This means I can recreate qubes using the latest
supported templates. I back up my qubes daily - in some cases hourly.
Because these are data backups I can select what data to restore - both
what files and what versions of those files.
This is what works for me. YMMV
I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.
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I can do this because I salt my templates and qubes, and keep those
states backed up. This means I can recreate qubes using the latest
supported templates.
Do you think you will be switching to Ansible, going forward?
Thanks for reminding me.
> Do you want the qubes or the data in those qubes?
Mostly the data - but - I'm obviously also concerned about the qube-templates.
> How much customisation have you done in the templates?
They are all personalized templates starting from either 'debian-13-minimal' or 'fedora-42-minimal' ...
> In the qubes?
None that I'm aware of ;-)
> What will you do if the template has reached eol or is no longer supported in 5+ years? (Extremely likely)
That's why I'm planing to take a backup of the template as well. - Am I missing something ?