Hi,
I did a couple of disaster recovery simulations. Result is rather devastating.
Procedure:
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Install Qubes-OS 4.0.3
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Create Qubes with real data (small and big). Mine are from under a gigabyte up to over 130GB, including a standalone Qubes-Builder Qube.
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Work with it a week and do daily backups. In my case around 250GB, if all Qubes are selected.
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Attach the backup medium (in my case a brand new 4TB USB3 disk).
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Follow the documentation at Emergency Backup Recovery without Qubes (v4). BTW: I scripted step 6 to 8. I was to lazy (and disappointed) to write a full script.
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The biggest Qube (~130GB) fails consistently to untar:
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now -
Delete private.img, and try again. In hope that it was just a hiccup, but fails too.
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In Qubes-OS backup only the Qube in question, and try again to restore. Same result.
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Since all of the above takes ages, I give up and rsync my data out of the live Qube in question. That will run probably until late in the night.
Note:
I started on Monday; today is Wednesday and I still haven’t recovered all the data. I used to work in enterprise disaster / recovery. If I would have needed more than one day to recover a storage system, I probably would have been fired the same day.
Conclusion:
The Qubes-OS backup is unreliable and in case of disaster by far to tedious, hence rather useless for production.
Below the script I used. Just to prove that I followed the documented procedure.
unpack-vm-image.cpiogz (646 Bytes)