Optional secondary storage?

User Support General
1

When using a secondary storage, on a second internal SSD,
as explained in Secondary storage | Qubes OS …

… what happens if I boot and the secondary storage is unavailable?

Will it boot up, and just the VMs from the secondary storage will be missing or inaccessible?
And if I reboot, and the second storage disk is available again, will everything be immediately available again?

Or will Qubes fail to start up, because the secondary storage disk is missing?

If the secondary storage could be configured as optional, then I’d be more flexible in case of hardware failures. If a backup computer has room only for one drive, then I could move the primary SSD, only, to the backup computer, and would at least be able to use my most important qubes.

2

If I remember it correctly, I did this exactly and the VMs of the second storage were displayed as usual but it was of course impossible to launch them.

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3

Right. Qubes will boot up and qubes on secondary storage will be show
but be inaccessible.
When you reboot with the other SSD attached, everything will be
immediately available again.

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