@solene refreshing publication, as usual. It’s nice to see some PoC showing that things can be used differently, shaking status quo. Good job at getting some eyes here and seeing some stats so that qubes backup/restore tool could be linked to other tools.
Yes…
Well, again, this is, to me, really old issue (2015!) [Contribution] qubes-incremental-backup-poc OR Wyng backup · Issue #858 · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub
And I do not see, really, how wyng-backup could get better but if more eyes were on it. Don’t get me wrong, qubes backup/restore has its use and I still use it personally once in a while, but I do not see how GitHub - tasket/wyng-backup: Fast backups for logical volumes & disk images and GitHub - tasket/wyng-util-qubes: Qubes integration for Wyng enables backup and restore by VM name doesn’t solve all the issues here while going even further with incremental backups that can literally run under a minute, not 15 (restic) or 17 (borg) .
Of course, i’m mixing a lot of things here as usual, but with bees+brtfs+wyng-backups, people could backup/restore all cloned+derived/specialized templates created by qusal/shaker, while brtfs alone could be extensively used to restore a local (and at no cost) snapshot that was taken 30 days ago (just like one of your post @solene), that being without external backups.
But to arrive there, yes, we need to, on one side, show the limitations of currently offered tools, but also most importantly prepare the next ones that fit better what the ecosystem is using those tools for. Anyway, this is my opinion and I don’t expect everyone to understand until those tools are packaged/distributed under contrib repositories…
But this thread again has a lot of technical people’s eyes, so I take the opportunity to remind people that qubes backup/restore has evolved a bit, but is mostly as it was designed years ago so people can backup/restore whole backups archives. If wyng-backups was criticized against lack of encryption/authentication mechanisms in the past (my 2021 presentation) , it was also resolved by proper implementation while [Contribution] qubes-incremental-backup-poc OR Wyng backup · Issue #858 · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub is still open and ink is spreading again on limitations of qubes backup/restore tool… Why are we not replacing/extending it by something more useful made to do grand things at his inception and improving since then? If before, wyng was not integrated with qubes api to get vm dependencies/properties and was just a block level incremental backup tool, with the arrival of wyng-util-qubes, user can restore a qube+properties just as qubes tool.
I guess my question now is: what is missing for wyng-backup/wyng-backup-util to deeply be considered for what it offers and what involvement is needed for it to replace/extend qubes current backup/restore limited functionalities?
@adw : maybe clarify next steps needed either