How to use wyng-backup?

I’m in a pinch …

Brendan Hoar suggested giving @tasket’s wyng-backup a try. I’d like to very much, but know nothing about lvm and thin pools etc.

What I intended to do:

wyng --local=vg/pool --dest=internal:/ --subdir=home/user arch-init
wyng add my_win_qube

… then I expect to have some *.img file in dom0 under /home/user, which I will then transfer to the other machine and call

wyng --local=vg/pool --dest=internal:/ --subdir=home/user arch-init
wyng --save-to=myfile.img receive my_win_qube

But I already fail at the very first step. My setup is vanilla (all lvm stuff done by the installer after giving it the entire drive) Can someone please walk me through how to get the qube from the one to the other machine?

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Hi Sven,

You need to know some LVM details to start using Wyng. On Qubes the following will show the necessary info:

sudo lvs | awk '{print $2, $1}' | grep pool

On Qubes 4.0 you should see ‘qubes_dom0 pool00’. That is the vg and the pool.

To add an ‘App’ qube’s storage volume to the archive, you probably want only the private volume. Qubes private volumes are prefixed with ‘vm-’ and suffixed with ‘-private’. So you would run sudo wyng add vm-my_win_qube-private and then sudo wyng send. To backup a template or standalone qube, you would add both the ‘-private’ and the ‘-root’ volumes.

The above will produce a ‘wyng.backup’ archive directory, not an img file. This is what you would transfer to the other system.

Note that Wyng doesn’t save Qubes VM settings, so you would need to configure the qube/VM settings on the destination system manually before using wyng receive.


With that said, I don’t know if Wyng is really matching your intent here. Wyng is meant for repeated backups of the same volumes (from the same source) over time, and to make that process very efficient. If you are simply transferring over to a new system as a one-time procedure, and qubes-backup is somehow not up to the task, there are simpler ways to do it using tools like dd and gzip. For example, sudo dd if=/dev/qubes_dom0/vm-my_win_qube-private | gzip >private.img.gz and on the destination system (after creating & configuring the destination qube manually): gunzip -c private.img.gz | sudo dd conv=sparse of=/dev/qubes_dom0/vm-my_win_qube-private. OTOH, if your intent is regular repeated backups then disregard this paragraph.

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Many thanks @tasket! I’ll start with the dd method but will start using wyng on the target machine.

Just FYI, I created a thread for the new Wyng v0.3 beta.

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How can I install Wyng? Do I have to dl the py script and run it in the AppVM? That’s very time consuming for users who have dozens of AppVMs.