Full Backup with all settings possible?

Block50 · September 12, 2024, 6:36pm

So I massively overestimated how much disk space I would need for Qubes OS and would like to shrink the volume.

But I understand that shrinking a thin volume (LUKS) can be tricky. So I thought of a Backup-Format-Shrink-Reinstall-Restore Backup Solution.

I already backup all qubes weekly but in the documentation it says that in dom0 only files in ~\home will be backed up.

That’s bad because I was lazy with documentation when initially configuring my Qubes OS installation I am sure I modifies some global firewall settings, policies and usb settings with several

‚sudo nano something/something‘

which I now don’t remember throughly because I was just following random tutorials that just worked.

Everything works as it should now but I fear that a simple backup would not restore all these little changes I’ve made.

Is there any way to backup like EVERYTHING without copying the disk 1:1?

parulin · September 12, 2024, 7:18pm

You can copy any file outside /home inside it with this command:

sudo cp -r /etc "$HOME"

In this case $HOME will be replaced by /home/<your_username>. You can then back up dom0. While restoring, you can go to the restored files and do:

sudo cp -r etc /etc

I took /etc as an example because I believe it’s the place where any configuration file should go. Before restoring them, it would be better to check the differences between a fresh Qubes OS configuration and the previous one, in order to document your changes.

You can probably look for any sudo nano command in the .bash_history file of dom0 to get an idea of those changes.

solene · September 12, 2024, 7:40pm

salt stuff are in /srv/user_*

copying /etc/ over the new files may destroy the system, files like /etc/fstab may be different.

ludovic · September 13, 2024, 2:35pm

Hi @Block50 ,
you could use the @ben-grande 's qvm-backup-dom0-provision script as a cron job:

github.com

ben-grande/dotfiles/blob/main/files/dom0/.local/bin/dom0/qvm-backup-dom0-provision

#!/bin/sh

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2023 Benjamin Grande M. S. <ben.grande.b@gmail.com>
#
# SPDX-License-Identifier: AGPL-3.0-or-later

## qvm-backup only backs up home dir, therefore save other dirs to our home.
set -eu

source_dirs="
/etc/qubes/policy.d
/etc/qubes/backup
"

target_dir="/home/user/backup/$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M)"

for dir in ${source_dirs}; do
  mkdir -p "${target_dir}${dir}"
  cp -a "${dir}"/* "${target_dir}/${dir}"
done

and add in source_dirs the suggested salt path by @solene