hey all , i am a long time user of tails and have recently switched over to qubes and love it so far. I have everything set up without hassle and working great.
I currently have a lot of files on Tails persistence and would like to somehow transfer them over. I can do some of these manually which would be time consuming! But some files i cant manually switch over. Can any one point me in the direction to open up my persistence volume up in a VM so i cna then transfer my files over to my Desired VM to save.
Thank you in advance for any help. I am still pretty new to Qubes in general so sorry if any thing i wrote is wrong
Hello there.
Not quite sure how tails persistence works, but if it’s a cryptsetup partition, can’t you connect the usb to the vm of your choice and dd the partition there?
Or even unlock the partition in that vm and simply copy its contents.
If that doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll try to find a spare drive to test it out.
hey mate thank you for the reply. Went to load up TAILS on a HVM standalone and restarted it but it seems my tails does not even start now? It says TAILS started but nothing coming up. I re ran its startup from debug mode and its said ‘Tails login:’ for a split second and then the screen went blank? Any idea whats happening? I feel like im missing something so simple somewhere along the line here haha
I found this guide about how to run tails in qubes: Contents/tails.md at master · Qubes-Community/Contents · GitHub
It starts from an iso so I’d assume a clean tails.
Connect the tails usb to qubes then open a terminal in sys-usb and run lsblk. What kind of partitions do you see?
If a separate partition is found for your persistence, are you able to unlock it with cryptsetup open /dev/<part> ?
Not sure in what type of crypto container tails stores its stuff in, but i want to mention that you can mount some block device (some crypto container on another qube, USB-Sticks (of course with a crypto container), mount that and copy your persistent stuff onto that.
If you are using qubes and you use the tails persistence, i would however argue that the usage of a whonix workstation is supperior. It offers you extra protection through whonix, more anonymity due to static guards at the cost of forensics (which should not be a real problem if you can keep your FDE password secret).
If you can be forced to reveal that, you can be forced to reveal your Tails persistence key. You do have a forensics advantage if your adversary knows your FDE pw and you are not using persistence with tails. However this comes at the cost of rotating guards, and less resilience against attacks. I think maybe a forensics hardened, purely RAM based whonix would combine both worlds.
For this reason i think Tails does not offer you more security in most use cases, but exposes you to other kinds of attacks against anonymity. On the premise, that both pw reveals would result in mayor or catastrophic OPSEC breach.
So in summary, i think that tails in combination with persistence and Qubes offer you much more disadvantages, that using both systems independently.
If your adversary has your FDE pw your are pretty much FUBAR anyways… And if not, anti forensics is not a real concern.
However i am happy to debate that and change my mind!
Hey mate sorry for the long reply. I ended up finding a extremely easy solution by just simply mounting a encrypted usb into tails and transferring the files over lol. Thank you for all the replies and help i appreciate it!
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Thats exactly what i ended up doing in the end mounting a usb to tails and transferring over haha so simple i was over complicating everything. And i agree with everything you said. I was more using tails due to my laziness and simplicity of it. Now im on Qubes i can see no way of going back to Tails i love it. Looks so clean and security is A1
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