Backup and restore Qubes settings (not individual qubes)

User Support
1

Hi,

I recently upgraded the SSD on my device and so went through a complete backup and restore cycle. I normally just do the backup and verify process.

Restoring the various qubes that I use was trivial and pain free so kudos to all on a very simple process.

However, unless I messed something up, restoring the tweaks that I had to make to xen.cfg (and which I had forgotten about), as well as reasonably important things relating to autoloading keyboards down to trivial things such as menu locations / screen size, all had to be redone from scratch.

Is there a way to export the xen / dom0 settings so when you restore, you restore to the same environment that you had backed up?

I had assumed that a simple clone of the original SSD onto the new SSD wouldn’t work, and I can’t seem to find a way to backup non specific qubes.

Not a major thing - just an annoyance but thought I’d ask. The main backup/restore of the qubes was fine.

2

There are a few related bugs in the Issue tracker:

By the way, how about using new “Paranoid mode ” backup restore option instead, throwing away your old configuration to make sure your new system is not compromised? Would it be worth it?

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3

Interesting, I have a thread on here about how to get a cron job working in a qube, and part of that involved a dom0 change.

I had forgotten about that until now, but I note that the cron job (a backup script) is working fine and as expected post backup/restore on to the new SSD, so I’m guessing the dom0 change wasn’t actually needed, or some dom0 changes did make it over.

4

This might be also helpful.

Backing up changes to dom0
When backing up dom0 using the Qubes backup tool (explained below), only the home directory is backed up. Therefore, if there are files outside of the home directory you wish to save, you should copy them into the home directory prior to creating a backup. Here is an example of how to back up Qubes config files and RPC policies:

$ mkdir -p ~/backup/etc/qubes/
$ cp -a /etc/qubes/* ~/backup/etc/qubes/
$ mkdir ~/backup/etc/qubes-rpc/
$ cp -a /etc/qubes-rpc/* ~/systemfiles/etc/qubes-rpc/

To restore these files, move them from the restored directory in dom0’s home back to their appropriate locations in /etc/ . Please note that any packages installed via the package manager in dom0 will not be backed up. Such packages will have to be reinstalled through the package manager when restoring on a fresh installation.

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