Why do I like raw disk backups?
Upgrading Qubes, specifically dom0, has the risk of either bricking boot or networking. Both happened to me several times in the past. These are situations which are difficult to recover from and break productivity.
How else could I test if upgrades with reasonable certainty that my system won’t get bricked? Perhaps by having an identical spare notebook of the same type with the very same hardware.
As for the time required to perform a raw disk backup, it’s going to boot menu, booting a Live DVD or Live USB. Doing the backup. With an internal 1 TB SSD hard drive (M.2 storage chip) (NVMe) to an external USB 3.1 NVMe it took ~ 1 hour. That’s quite okay for my use case.
These aren’t the only backups I am doing. I am also doing backups using the Qubes Backup tool.
Raw disk backups are useful in case:
- A) preventing a brick after upgrades
- B) preventing to become a victim of a similar backups horror story, other Qubes Backup tool issues. (In the past due to some issue with
scrypt, I couldn’t restore backups on a newer Qubes version.)
Documentation on how to create full raw disk backups: