How you guys stores big files in Qubes OS?

im just wondering.
i have a lot of music, some of movies, and a lot of windows and linux isos.
i have been storing them on vault appvm and i think its fine.

recently, i only notice that my shutdown is slow because of vault appvm takes time to shutdown.
that vm alone takes nearly 5 minutes to completely shutdown, so i dig it a little.

i realized that when i shut it down, it create a copy of private partitions by defaults.
its not a bad features.
except when i have few hundreds gb of files in it.
then it really takes a lot of times to copy it.

i tried changing revision_to_keep to 0 but it still create a backup and then delete it.
i notice that info fully based on running qvm-volume i vault:private in a loop.
or should i say, up => enter.

so i wanted to know, how do you guys keep that much of a files if you have them?
or that shouldnt be kept on vault?

1 Like

I use external media for archival purposes, and keep Qubes OS hygienically lean in execution by aggressively auditing and pruning all file ingress.

2 Likes

i see.
im a technician too so i tend to save everything that i can (windows and linux i meant) on this laptop.
sometimes, all the usb port of this laptop is used for cloning or creating a bootable drives.
since customer are different and request different things, i store a couple of dosent isos with different languages.
dont worry, all the cloning and copying isos is done on dispvm.

that got me thinking, is there any ways i can make a partitions that is accessable by vault, but not gonna include in the backup?

1 Like

If you are dealing with bare-metal Linux installations, use Ventoy:

Get a large USB drive, install Ventoy on it, place ISO files on the USB drive, then replace them as needed by clients.

2 Likes

yeah.
i know ventoy.
in facts, i have it in my toolbox with most common uses iso.
in my drive is not too common one but still requested.

anyways, i guess theres no other options then except external drive?
thanks for your time then.

1 Like

Your main question is asking how I store big files in Qubes OS, and my answer is I simply do not. Your partition question is separate and therefore requires its own dedicated topic in the User Support or User Support > General category. This current topic is only for general discussion, not synthesizing a technical solution for your use case.

2 Likes

i see.
but thanks again for your time.
ill keep in external drive for now.

1 Like

Had a new idea that i can just create a multiple vault where isos stored somewhere else.
benifits : i dont have to turn it on every day when i just want to listen to music or do some basic stuff.
cons (maybe) : it will still slow down when i shutdown that vms.

1 Like

I went with the lvm infrastructure my qubes run on.

It is a default lvm2 thin pool - therefore I can create volumes on it as I want. Due to being thin provisioned, they only use the storage they really need and I can overprovision my drive/pool.

The cool thing, I can snapshot them separately from my qubes.

To make this setup work, I had to give the lvs their distinct devive mapper id
lvchange --minor 666 --persistent y /dev/that_pool/that_data_lv

1 Like

Hi folks,

To my knowledge, this has always been the one and only right way to do it.

When we need faster access to certain data, we copy it to faster media
and we delete them when we’re done (when it’s not automatic, like in volatile memory or caches).

Cheers,

1 Like

mirrored NAS

1 Like

That’s not really a copy but a snapshot. The time it takes to create and/or delete such a snapshot is proportional to how fragmented the data is (as opposed to its size). Are you using the default LVM installation layout, or Btrfs/XFS? It’s relatively straightforward to defragment storage volumes in the latter.

You might want to set revisions_to_keep to -1 to avoid that completely. The downside (compared to revisions_to_keep set to 0) is you’d no longer be able to back up or clone the VM while it is running.

3 Likes

its LVM.
not sure if it changes the default recently but not when i installed it at version r4.0 and has been in-place update all the way.

also, that revision_to_keep -1 does the jobs.
shutdown only takes like 5 seconds now.
qvm-shutdown --wait isos-library 0.22s user 0.08s system 6% cpu 4.795 total

was thinking that i have 1tb of ssd in this laptop and why not just shoved an isos in it too.
even with that iso, i only uses like 45% of the total uses spaces.
at least based on Qubes Disk Space Monitor icon on notification area.

1 Like