I personally see too many Qubes OS users coming to the forum and asking for help because they have an issue and they did not make backup. We should improve that.
Why do you think people do not make backups? How could we raise awareness of the importance of backups to end users?
Here are my thoughts:
Doing backup with Qubes OS is rather easy using the GUI tool, but it is barely an automated process and unfortunately it requires too much space. When you have 800 GB of qubes to save and you want to keep a working copy of your last backup, you need at least twice the storage. The Qubes backup tool is also extremely slow, I roughly estimate it to 1 hour for 100 GB to save using a recent i7 CPU which is extremely slow, but I do not think it’s a blocker to end user (as many do not seem to have made even a single backup).
The Qubes manager GUI tool display an information about backups, maybe we could leverage this for qubes that are often started but never backup? A notification that one should think about a backup because last because is older than N days (maybe a week would be fine?), this could be opt-out process. This may annoy users, but they could disable it, and I think it could help a lot people who do not think backups are important.
Maybe we could do like in video games during load screens (boot / shutdown now there is a logo display), show a message like “Remember to back up your qubes regularly”.
I think people do not make backups as they think they will never need it. Maybe the extra storage cost may be a show stopper too? But if someone cares about their data, getting access to an external storage seems reasonable (financially speaking).
If you read this topic and you are not doing backups, please tell us why and what would make you create backups? Please avoid reports if you are not doing backups on purpose because you do not have anything valuable to save, this is a perfectly fine workflow and unrelated to the topic.
i think color coding the qubes manager column: Last backup with green (maybe last 30 days) yellow (1- 3 months) and red (+3month) ? (if include in backsups = true)
I do believe you answered your own question. Until backups are done automatically (IIRC, they are in LVM snapshot, but those are unreliable because a small change will take its place) and put in the core documentation the majority won’t do it.
A “save screen” for users when a qube boots up and hasn’t been backed up in a while XD. This sounds like it might actually work. If one could leverage the LVM snapshot to create backups in the background with little user interaction, then put it on the fs (maybe a sys-backup?) for [optional] export or on-disk restore. The main thing would be as little user interaction as possible; a one-time setup maybe, but then a one-click solution. In my experience users that don’t backup either have their own good reasons or are lazy (including users who have questions they haven’t bothered to ask; sometimes people are too busy with their lives), so it should definitely be a polished feature. Other users will do it regardless.
This isn’t to discount storage space, but that’s relatively cheap and easy.
I admit I always wondered what changes across 800 gigs are made, so I would need frequent backups?
Also
was always questionable for me. Will I able to restore it? How should I know it’s working in a way I need it? Maybe I need something from previous version, because I messed up some configuration in the last one, but wasn’t aware before rebooting and after creating such a “last working backup”?
So, what I do is to create a single instance of a full backup once I set the Qubes the way I prefer (confirming it works by rebooting the system), manipulate all the data exclusively on external storage, so I don’t need to back that up, and from time to time to backup only specific qubes (like standalones and vault which I frequently use), again on external storage.
You asked why we don’t make backups, so that’s my answer (logic)
The GUI is very user-friendly but It’s true the time is a counterpart or at least, this is my experience.
I feel like this would be nice even to people that do backups but, for any reason, forget or would be unable to do backups after some time.
Nice idea, I don’t know if i would prefer it to be more aggresive to something like “Qubes DOES NOT backup the qubes, if you don’t have a backup you may lose all data in that qube” to show the importance of it and the dangers of having important-needy information or qube without it’s backup.
This would not help as it is stored on the same medium as your qubes os install, it will not be useful if:
the computer is stolen
the disk dies
the LUKS filesystem is damaged
if you incrementally make changes to these 800 GB (like adding pictures, passwords, whatever), you need to backup the whole thing again. Without incremental backups this is insane to make daily backups.
by “working copy of your last backup”, I mean that you should not have to delete your current backup to free space for a new one, this could be an issue if you lack disk space (that is almost solved with incremental backup but the official tool does not support it)
backups must be tested, the restore GUI allows to test a backup (it’s still super slow but it’s reliable)
so, you have no backups of your data, right?
does people think Qubes OS is doing backups alone?
it’s likely because most people do not know how to do backups. or how to save them. for example how to upload a backup of one single qube to secure cloudstorage?
Most of the “changes” are the data. Data is stored on external storage. I don’t care about updates and patches (I take notes about customization), the worse they can be dangerous. So, almost anything regarding full (incremental or not) backup is not related to Qubes, except the single full backup instance.
I have backup of my data, but created on external storage too, and within qubes, not created by Qubes. Also, I graduate my data in terms of a backup. If something is extremely sensitive, I immediately do create several copies of it on several places at once at the moment of manipulation. On the other hand there are other data I can live without, so I back them up once in a several months (from one external storage to the other, within a qube).
I’m too old to live in a 'what-if" fear. Instead, I know what to do “when” it happens and prepared myself to lose some things. They’re just bunch of “0” and “1” at the end of the day, and I will not bring them with me to the grave.
For example, I lost my Win qube trying to import it from backup after upgrading from 4.1 to 4.2. It doesn’t work under 4.2 with Xen PV disk drivers for Win. So what was the worth of that backup? That’s what I meant when I wrote “will I be able to restore it?”
Well. my strategy was that all the data actually were on the external storage, independent of the qube itself. So, since we cannot attach block devices any more, I had a “clean” win qube from a single instance full backup, without qwt installed, I restored it (I could create a new one from the scratch, it’s faster, right?), found a workaround to attach external storage, and voila.
Maybe they do, maybe they just didn’t think about doing backups but it would make them think about that qube (or qubes) that losing, could mean a lot so at least, maybe they try a backup
I like the idea of indicating when backups were last made in some way -
but color coding is not for everyone.
One issue is that Qubes backup focusses on qubes, and not data. I
understand that Wyng provides incremental backups, but at the risk
of another rant, it seems to me to be a clever answer to the wrong
question. Something like Wyng, or the default backup, is simply not an
adequate backup of data.
I can provide multiple examples to support this. One will do. The CEO
of a company had been working on a pitch. They found that sections 4-9 were
duplicates of section 2. How? Who knows?
Is it easy to fix this using Qubes backup? With Wyng? No. What’s needed
is a proper data backup, from which it is easy to restore multiple
versions of the file from past backups, to access the missing sections.
The company, without my knowledge, had dropped their previous regime in
favour of Wyng. The CEO was unimpressed at the process and time required
to get back the missing data…
How do you make people back up their data? Provide them with a workable
backup system, and remind them on some schedule. I do this with a
simple script that is triggered for important qubes, but a more complex
system could involve checks run against the backup medium, whatever that is.
In answer to the original question, people do not make backups because
it is easier for them not to do so. That’s why an automated system is
best.
I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.
It was clear enough that backups are important, because you have made GUI for it, and, write about that in the documentation. So in my opinion there is no need to make notifications or color indicators or something equally annoying.
As for me, there were two obstacles.
Difficult start. When you want to start making backups, you need to decide a lot of things:
What I need to backup?
Where I want to store the backups? Threats of each option:
If I store them locally I can loose them with the hard drive
If I store them on an external drive, I need to buy one. HDD or SSD? What parameters? What if something happens in my room and destroys both PC and the storage drive?
Cloud storage? How secure is that? How private? What can they see from my files? Should I connect to them directly, via VPN or via Tor? Can someone (government) restrict access to the backups?
Do I need to apply some additional security measures to ensure nothing was changed, such as keeping hash, signing or something else? How to implement it?
Difficult to continue. Sometimes, I am lazy to make backup because I need to spend time for it. Mostly, I backup on an external drive so I need to:
Start sys-usb, start the disposable backup qube
Attach the drive to the backup qube
Mount it from the terminal
Make notes what I am backuping.
Choose in the backup manager which qubes I want to backup this time
Get the backup password from a password vault
Wait for the backup process
Calculate hashes
I am not sure, is it possible to make this process easier. I think you’ve already made an excellent job. However, I hope my reply will help
Not really I’m an humble contributor, mostly on the forum and documentation
good, many people do not really think about the case in which they have to recover their data without their computer/password manager, you can easily be locked out otherwise
If you read this topic and you are not doing backups, please tell us why and what would make you create backups?
Backup is an essential part of data security but that part is not good enough in Qubes.
On my bare-metal Linux systems I do everyday tape backup using Bacula. It takes a few minutes to backup the whole LAN.
Unfortunately, Qubes’ backup system is incomparable to what Bacula offers. As long as there is no decent (official, stable, not beta/testing/someday) incremental and differential backup, fine-tunable etc, that goes against all claims that Qubes aims for usability too. Ideally, a bare-metal recovery system would be great.
Perhaps Bacula’s system can be integrated into Qubes if the network part is handled through vchan calls, i.e. as Qubes module for Bacula. Then a sys-backup could take care of handling the process automatically on schedule.
Meanwhile, I do a backup from time to time… manually. As you said, it simply takes too much time and resources.
I live by my Qube" backup" with all of my builds/toolsets. I know from experience, that backing up my “Qube” at 585 Gib takes about 5-6hrs. No biggy, just start it and walk away and THANK GOD I have them. While yes I did have some issues of late, I provided as much detailed information when asked and help I could. I am SO GLAD that they were able to address/find my problem. Happily backing up now “FULLY” of my Qube,HVM’s,Templates,Domains,wallpapers,Tweaks…
during load screens (boot / shutdown now there is a logo display), show a message like “Remember to back up your qubes regularly”.
you did not mention you were doing a backup of your data externally 
