I'm having trouble backing up Qubes

User Support General
1

Good morning. I’m trying to back up a fresh installation of Qubes and I’m having difficulties. I attached a 2Tb external hard drive to my HP laptop and it connected through sys-usb. Then I ran the back up utility in Qubes. I managed to find the directory in sys-usb where the external drive had been mounted but I got an error message saying essentially there was insufficient space and it couldn’t complete. As you can see in the screenshot. Why would Qubes fail to back up to a 2Tb external drive which had plenty of space? I’d appreciate on help anybody could offer.

Screenshot_2024-07-22_07-46-10
Screenshot_2024-07-22_07-46-101920×1080 170 KB

I hope I managed to upload the image correctly and everybody can see it.

Regards

Tiff

2

Does your external drive have FAT32 filesystem?
FAT32 is limiting the maximum file size to 4 GB.

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3

when backing up my qubes to external drive. is it possible to have this drive encrypted through qubes?

4

The backup is encrypted by default if you set the password for it.
You can encrypt the drive itself any way you want as well, just set the backup destination path to the directory on the decrypted drive.

5

From sys-usb you need to format the drive partition using LUKS to create an encrypted volume, then unlock it and format it using ext4, xfs or btrfs filesystem.

This page explains how to proceed How to Encrypt an External Hard Drive on Linux (with Pictures) (I did search for tutorials, this one looked ok after a quick look).

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6

Looks that way. In the image it says that 4 GB was written.

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7

So what file system should I be using?

8

Hi just wondered why you asked this question on this thread and didn’t ask it as a separate question?

9

The drive does uses exFAT32 currently. Hope that helps

10

If you don’t plan to use this disk in Windows then you can use some Linux filesystem e.g. ext4.

There is no exFAT32 filesystem, it’s either FAT32 or exFAT.
To use exFAT filesystem you may need to install additional packages in the template.
If you plan to use this disk in Windows then it’s better to use exFAT filesystem.

11

I had in face planned to use the drive in Windows as well as Linux so is FAT32 the best option and would that still limit me to the 4Gb limit?

12

I’d recommend using NTFS as it will support large files and also works fine in both Windows and Linux.

13

Nice one, thanks for the advise. I’ll certainly try that

14

Worked a treat, thanks for that

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